The Lush Socialite

After her debut in Fabulous Lives Vs Bollywood Wives, Delhi's Shalini Passi-philanthropist, influencer, Bollywood celebrity and self-care divawho gives little boxes of herbal dust to her friends, is now in the mass eye. Fair or unfair, deal with her

- Chinki Sinha

"She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point." -The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter

In this house, you encounter several stories, time zones and places all at once. Money can collapse all natural and unnatural phenomena. Like the character in the story by Carter, who is a vampire and forever preserved in her bridal ensemble and in her youth, Shalini Passi, an art entrepreneur, whose eccentricities are now a rage after her debut in Fabulous Lives Vs Bollywood Wives, is a persona frozen in time. That time is now. Some are even calling her the new self-care guru. Passi is now everywhere. She knows nothing lasts forever. This fame that she had always aspired for has come to her at last. She is now a part of Bollywood.

She walked the runway for several designers over the last few years and, in 2020, in a flaming red dress, she was a part of an allegorical tale in artist Vibha Galhotra’s The Final Feast, where she is the protagonist who cuts a blue “globe-cake” before the rich and the elite leave the earth that has fallen apart after human greed has finished all resources. Inspired by The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, the staged-photo work is a sarcastic take on the rich and the rising inequality. Passi fit the part perfectly. For the artist, it was an obvious choice.