Oof! i don’t know how i will manage.” My friend of some years was having an almost-existential crisis the other day at our monthly lunch, picking through her tandoori pomfret as she fretted over her diary. There was just too much happening in the city and the dilemma of choice was deepening the furrow in her otherwise ironed-out brow. Normally she wears her reversible mantle of identity with great élan. On one side is her socialite-from-the-creamy-layer persona; on the other, a dilettantish connoisseur of the arts. That is when she is not organising charity events: a mini-tornado on heels she is also often on the Delhi-Mumbai-London shuttle.

You see until, well not a season or so ago, there would be two or three things happening of an evening. And I am not even talking about the wedding rash erupting and getting ever more threatening each winter. (To digress a bit about our increasingly surreal capital: forget the poor horse, you now even have grooms dropping down from the skies. A bridegroom left his village-town in Haryana on a helicopter headed to his future bride’s home in Kapusera, a bustling village-morphing-into-town near Delhi, all of 20 kilometres away. A galloping horse may have been there quicker, though. The groom wasn’t being terribly original either: two other men on their way to their nuptials descended from the sky this winter like gods in all their finery.) Now, my snobbish friend would never be seen attending weddings of rustic millionaires. Hers is the rarified world of opera, concerts and art. It’s almost raining operas here: the December winter did not prevent the Parma Royal Theatre from Italy to perform an assortment of Verdi, Donizetti and Puccini against the backdrop of the imposing Purana Quila. Opera is obviously the place to be seen at for the arrived and the arriving – even if they are shivering outdoors and some of the high notes the sopranos hit make them wish they were listening to Mika Singh and the soundtrack of Jab We Met. Not only was there hardly a seat left but this is the second coming for the Parma Royal Theatre: the growing tribe of opera aficionados wanted them back. In fact, a newspaper even published a ‘Dummy’s Guide to Opera’. Perhaps due to the tireless efforts of Francis Wacziarg, whose Neemrana Foundation has been staging several operas in Delhi and Mumbai. There has also been the blitzkrieg of the three-week-long debuting Delhi International Festival of the Arts organised by danceuse Pratibha Praladh.

Meanwhile, back at the lunch – the pomfret now reduced to just a few bones – my friend is talking about how difficult it is to stay culturally au courant. A new gallery sprouts every week in this haute and happening city that is growing in all directions like a giant octopus. From the shopping malls of Gurgaon and Noida on the outskirts of Delhi to urban villages like Ladoo Sarai the art chatter is getting louder, despite the falling prices. However, three gallerists being squeezed out of the city by the government are trying to give the area an air of Bohemian chic.

Sometimes things in the revved-up art world are getting to be so happening that you can glimpse what hasn’t quite happened. American painter and gallerist Peter Nagy of Nature Morte has begun to show works-in-progress of artists – installations, works of photographer Dayanita Singh. There was another happening event the other day. Art consultant and collector Nitin Bayana put up some of his new – and often cutting edge – acquisitions on the walls of a house in Sundar Nagar soon to be demolished, to make way for the new home for the Bayana family.

It was quite a surreal and exciting night. Right in the middle of the room was a gaping hole, something that could swallow a six-footer. “That’s an Anish Kapoor installation,” joked a wit, referring to the hole that had been dug to test the soil of the property. On the peeling walls were some outstanding works, especially Surinderan Nair’s painting of footballers and Ajay Desai’s impressive new work. It was all about the A-list of young and youngish artists – from Atul Dodiya to the new bright spark on the block, Chinmoy Pramanick (Promising Artist Award of the year by Art India magazine and the Visual Arts Gallery in Delhi).