I recently had the pleasure to sit in the Willingdon Club with relatives by a golf course on a balmy evening outdoors in the hot month of may in Mumbai. The club was built by the British and it is based on the clubs you find in London. I was told of an even more exclusive club in Mumbai which still only allowed Europeans to join even after Independence, for quite a while.
The fact of clubs does not aggravate me, they can be places of stillness in busy cities, places of study with wonderful libraries and places of work with a high level of the same strata of society joining. But I do wonder at the exclusivity and hoops one has to go through to join these places and what benefit it imparts but a transient sense of belonging and having made it in society. For all their elegance of style I am minded that these places are repositories if immense backwardness in our thinking.
At the Willingdon only children of past members may join. I won’t be applying. Not because I don’t want to be a member of a club that would have me, but because I don’t think these places should exist as they do, for exclusivity is just a synonym for prejudice.