Meet the gatecrashers

Some do it for the heck of it; some for free food and drink. And some do it to feel important. There is nothing quite like knocking back a cocktail with the city’s swish set, particularly if you come from the wrong side of the tracks. If you’re never going to get invited to the Page 3 parties, there’s only one way to find out what really goes on in the semi-lit rooms filled with soft music and the beautiful people: Gatecrash.Just walk through the door in your best suit, looking chic and confident. You belong to a party if you think you belong to the party.
In Wedding Crashers, John and Jeremy had it all figured out: How to crash a wedding and pick up a girl — available or not. They followed a simple seduction principle, namely that “there’s nothing like a wedding to get women feeling romantic”. They managed to gatecrash weddings like a train wreck, picking up and dropping girls at will. That’s until each falls hopelessly in love. The story turns mushy. Perhaps it loses some of its zest. “Yes, I crashed a lot of weddings. Yes, I met a lot of girls but it also led me to you,” John tells Claire, the love of his life.
If that sounds a bit cheesy, wait till you meet Chazz, the guru of wedding crashers who turned funeral crasher in the same cult flick. “Grief is nature’s most powerful aphrodisiac,” says Chazz, played by Will Ferrell at his best. The remark is an erotic overlay to Henry Kissinger’s famous statement about power being the biggest turn-on. “It’s like fishing with dynamite,” says Chazz, who manages to pick up two girls at a funeral before the credits begin to roll.
If you think Chazz is a freak of nature, clearly you haven’t heard about Sitaram. He lived near a cremation ground in Delhi and spent all his time attending the last rites of people he had never met. “It gave me a sense of purpose and a feeling of belonging,” said Sitaram, who grew up on the streets of Delhi, a few years ago.
The desire to belong is important and it can make people do crazy things. Many get obsessive about the need to be seen at the right place with the right kind of people. “I began my career by gatecrashing parties. I met ambassadors, actors, cricketers and singers and made my contacts. That’s the way I launched my own brand promotion company,” confesses the Delhi-based CEO of an event management company. “If I didn’t gatecrash the parties, I would never meet these people. That was the only way. I never got caught.”
Nobody minds a harmless gatecrasher. But there could be trouble if you crash a party by mistake as does Hrundi V Bakshi in the classic Peter Sellers film, The Party. Playing a wannabe Hollywood actor, Sellers is a total disaster at the party: he loses his shoe in a drain, falls into water, gets smashed on vodka and the chicken flies off his plate and lands on a woman’s head. The party ends with everything slipping under water as Sellers tries to bathe a baby elephant. “If you’ve ever been to a wilder party... you’re under arrest,” was the tagline of the 1968 cult film, which made people believe gatecrashing was fun and gatecrashers rather nice people.
Amar Singh wouldn’t agree with this. The country’s biggest party animal felt humiliated five years ago when he was accused of gatecrashing a dinner hosted by Sonia Gandhi in the wake of the Congress victory in the parliamentary elections. Amar Singh still believes that he was “invited” and later, “humiliated” by some Congress leaders. For someone like Amar Singh, who is seen at almost every party in Delhi and Mumbai, gatecrashing is an idea he doesn’t probably understand.