ALMOST EVERY YEAR for nearly two and a half decades, Shekhar Gupta hosted a party on Diwali.

In 1990, when the tradition started, he was a senior editor at India Today magazine. His home was one floor of a house in a colony near the Indian Institute of Technology in south Delhi, and the party was a modest, intimate affair—a few friends, relatives and colleagues, some of whom lived alone, celebrating the festival with him, his wife, and their two children. There was serviceable, fusty catering, sometimes from the India International Centre, and the guests doubled up as bartenders.

In 2003, after an eight-year period during which he became first editor, then CEO, of the Indian Express, transforming it into the capital’s most influential  newspaper, Gupta bought a large house in the same neighbourhood. The party grew with him. A scrum of official vehicles—red beacons flashing, sirens wailing—choked the narrow street outside. As their wards hobnobbed, National Security Guard commandos would eat together in an area set aside for staff. The “entire local thana” would be present because of all the VIPs, someone who attended the parties since the early 1990s told me. Cabinet ministers, top bureaucrats, intelligence officers and senior cops mingled with famous journalists. High commissioners clinked glasses with leading intellectuals and industrialists. “If you wish to rub shoulders with the political, business and media glitterati of Delhi and Mumbai,” an article on the capital’s “A-list” in India Today told readers a few years ago, “get invited.”

Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj, and the late Pramod Mahajan, were regulars, as was the Congress stalwart and two-time finance minister P Chidambaram, a close ally of Gupta. The BJP politician and current finance minister, Arun Jaitley, would also stop by. Even Sonia Gandhi could occasionally be spotted in the crowd of about two hundred people shuffling in and out, helping themselves to food from the five-star ITC Maurya hotel.

An omnipresent newspaperman in the age of celebrity television anchors, Gupta wheeled through his parties with determination. He’s “a social terrorist,” a senior television journalist told me. “He will look at you for five seconds, shake your hand, then look at who’s the next person coming in. The party is just to show off who all he knows.” The Congress politician and former cabinet minister Mani Shankar Aiyar called the soirées “social climbing efforts.” He said Gupta “acquires his influence” at such events and is “quick to accept” invitations. At someone else’s party, Gupta “cut me dead and he walked away,” Aiyar recounted. “It was very uncomfortable. And I never mentioned it to him.” (He added, “I am sure he will avidly read every comment about him here, so let me get my own back this way.”)

As his Diwali bash turned into an essential way station on the capital’s social circuit, Gupta gained ever greater access to the country’s elite. Many of those present at his parties appeared at one point or another on Walk the Talk, his popular weekly interview show on NDTV. In the introduction to a forthcoming anthology of these interviews, Gupta writes that he spoke to more than five hundred “stellar guests ... including heads of states, top politicians, film and sportstars, scientists and beauty queens, 14 Nobel Laureates so far in different fields.” The growing guest list—of the parties and the series—was a measure of how far he had come. The son of a minor bureaucrat, Gupta became one of the best-connected, and richest, journalists in the country, with an annual salary that sometimes exceeded Rs 10 crore, or roughly $1.6 million. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, for journalism, in 2009. Perhaps no other reporter has been as successful in pairing a warm, down-to-earth manner with the sort of hard-nosed ambition it takes to achieve proximity to power.

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