The food and beverages manager of a certain five-star hotel in Delhi is what is charmlessly referred to as an RNRI, a Returned Non-Resident Indian. There is a slight curl to his lip as he talks, he refers to himself in the third person, and he makes it abundantly clear that he has been living out of India for long enough to shake the dirt of his mother country right off his shoes. There is a lot of chat about Louis Vuitton, handmade loafers, truffle oil and P‚trus, the latter being because I had heard a Delhi columnist talking on BBC Radio 4 about how the new moneyed Indians “are drinking P‚trus as though it was water”. I wanted to know what Mr Food and Truffle thought about that. “Oh come on,” he said. “Who is kidding who, no one was drinking wine here a few years ago and now they suddenly all know about Petrus?” Read the full article…

Financial Times, Mar 11, 2006