The South Wing

I’d been to New York before moving here last fall to attend Columbia University–through the telescopic lens of HBO’s Sex and the City. The seemingly frivolous adventures of New York-based relationship columnist Carrie Bradshaw and her three equally fabulous female friends provided a somewhat intimate–if one-dimensional–glimpse of New York life. And with no other frame of reference, I clutched, with all sincerity, to this HBO reality on the flight from Bombay here.

On the cab ride from JFK Airport to my brother’s place in Midtown, I, through the jetlag and curious mix of excitement and nervousness, peered out the window to inspect that much talked-about species: the New Yorker. It was around 9 a.m. on a weekday, and people were rushing to work. I knew what to look for: manicured fingers wrapped around Starbucks cups, black and white Hugo Boss suits on men punching away on their BlackBerrys, perfectly groomed hair that seemed painted on to the foreheads of impossibly gorgeous women, and, of course, the shoes. It was all just as HBO had said it would be–except for the shoes.

Instead of the Manolo Blahnik stilettos glued to the feet of Carrie, her friends, and every other woman in the series were ridiculous green and pink flip-flops. As the cab slowed down at a traffic light, I could see some of the women carrying their office shoes in totes or simply slung around their fingers. Some were expertly slipping a flip-flop off one foot while fastening the clasp on a patent leather office pump on the other. Some, I learned later, would perform this operation in the privacy of the space under their office desks. In Carrie’s world however, women run through New York streets in four-inch heels; flip flops and other such real-world practical banalities never make an appearance.

As much as shoes have been an important metaphor in exposing the flippancies of television reality to me, it extends beyond that. On evenings I feel generous enough to go beyond the limitations of my student budget, I have had an occasional taste of the Carrie Bradshaw life. The setting of the series is not entirely untrue, yet it is only a slice in the gargantuan pizza of what is New York City–something that fails to come across to scores of women who watch the show not knowing any better. After four months here, I’ve learned that Carrie and her friends’ Upper East Side pearls and champagne-brunch lives, are as much a reality as the bylanes of Chinatown, the bazaars of Jackson Heights in Queens, the hipster residences at Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the projects of Harlem.

Television hardly claims to project the truth, and it was probably naive of me to take this aspirational series as an indicator of anything real. But I’m not alone. In July, a month before moving here, in online chats with soon-to-be classmates, I remember how prominently Sex and the City it s a mad mad mad mad world dvd

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featured in our conversations about the impending year at school. Like me, my future classmates from Denmark and Brazil had never been to New York. But we’d watched Carrie there, so thought we knew it. Across three continents, our varied personal, professional, geographical and cultural backgrounds were all married by a common foolish love for the glitterati-ridden series.

In any case, my previously undying loyalty to the series has faded after the atrocious Sex and the City movie killed the well-made series. Now I watch The L Word, set in Los Angeles. As someone interested in writing about film, I have a particular interest in the city that is home to much of the movie industry. I marvel at the sprawling houses, the overdose of everything organic, and the overriding emphasis on fitness and holistic living in which all the characters seem to revel. This time around, I thought I’d watch The L Word

with some caution and a pinch of salt. But I don’t. Where’s the fun in that?