A fashionable soiree to celebrate the blossoming of the tan hua cactus that happens only once a year, at night. A Versace bomber jacket while lounging at home and ensuring your children finish what’s on their plate, because “think of all the starving children in America”. A bachelor party featuring Miss World contestants on a container ship in the middle of the ocean with guests flown in on a squadron of $8 million Dauphin choppers. A welcome home party on the rooftop of the Marina Bay Sands hotel with the national synchronised swimming team performing in the infinity pool. A Rolex Daytona bought on a lark for the husband. Houses modelled on Donald Trump’s bathroom. A Garden of Eden wedding in which each guest waves hundreds of handcrafted butterflies and fireflies on artificial branches, highlighted with LEDs and the bride wades through a stream of water in a waterproof wedding dress to get to the groom.Straight out of the lifestyles of the rich and famous in India, right? Yes, could be, but Crazy Rich Asians, from which these scenes are plucked out, is set in Singapore and features Indians only as burly guards and domestic staff. Released on August 15 to much love at the box office in the US, the movie is being hailed as the ‘Black Panther moment’ for Asian Americans, albeit with some murmuring from Singapore about how it doesn’t represent the island state’s diversity (it focuses only on the Chinese community, virtually ignoring the presence of others.)Warner Bros, the studio that produced it, is not planning a theatrical release of the Jon Chu-directed film in India. A Warner Bros spokesperson in India confirmed ‘they don’t have plans for the theatrical launch” without giving any reasons, but isn’t it time for our own Crazy Rich Indian moment? Especially since we have so much in common with the movie and the book on which it is based, Kevin Kwan’s 2013 bestseller, Crazy Rich Asians?Aside from the hot pink Audis and customised Land Rovers, it is everything an Indian rom com on upscale Indians would be, the kind that Karan Johar would make for us before he became self conscious about his poshness.There’s Nick Young, educated in England, slumming it in New York as a professor of history, Singapore’s Prince Harry. There’s Rachel Chu, a Chinese American, raised by a single mother, an economics professor of game theory in New York, plucky, pretty, perky, ready to be made over by her Gucci-wearing best friend and her very gay BFF. And there are the rom com obstacles – his wealth, her relative poverty; his patrician mother, her immigrant mother; his large family and her lack of one.All the familiar tropes are there. There’s the prospective wicked mother-in-law, mother superior, dressed in Valentino and Elie Saab, played with icy perfection by Michelle Yeoh. She’s Eleanor, the ultimate rich matron, a husband away in Australia running his business; a son virtually given to her own mother-in-law to raise so he could be the favourite grandson and inherit all the lovely lolly, as well as a group of friends whom she regularly meets for Bible class and auntie gossip in a Star Trek-shaped home.She’s the kind of woman who responds to challenges by throwing money at it – when the racist manager of a London hotel suggests she and her young family go to Chinatown to stay, she calls her husband to buy the hotel. Her moment of triumph comes when she reverses the roles and suggests to the manager that he mop up the wet floor.She loves her son, picking out the shirt for him to go with the Dolce and Gabbana suit (naturally), waving prospective brides at him who have the right breeding and boarding school background, and ensuring she hires a detective to dig up dirt on Rachel. Her friendly advice to Rachel, given Lalita Pawar style, down a winding staircase: You will never be enough. Eleanor is a great one for contrasting women in the East and West: American women pursue their passions, Eastern women take a step back for their families and build things that last. She was educated at Cambridge as well, like her husband, but he and his family came first. She still struggles with her own mother-in-law who even after so many years manages to rile her by criticising her dumpling-making technique – I suggest replacing this scene in the Indian version of the movie with a gobi paratha competition.There are other set pieces which will need translation – a critical mahjongg game between Eleanor and Rachel can be replaced by bridge and Eleanor’s prescription for her son’s tiredness, herbal soup, can be steaming hot dal-chawal. In fact, Crazy Rich Asians spends an inordinate amount of time focused on food, from scenes of Singapore’s famed street cuisine to Tupperware containers of homemade food to be carried on flights by hapless children, which can be transposed to India without a problem.There is also the dutiful son, the momma’s beta, Nick, torn between his love for his mother and his love for Rachel. He thinks nothing of travelling first class, says he is “comfortable” when asked if he is rich, is by her side correcting her gaffes (like not drinking the water that is offered to wash her hands) and like Prince Charming, thinks nothing of flying in her mother from America when she needs her most.There is the lippy best friend from college who lives all day in Stella McCartney pajamas in a house modelled after Donald Tump’s bathroom and happily keeps a Gucci cocktail dress in the trunk of her car (Peik Lin, played by Ocean’s 8‘s Awkwafina). There’s the gorgeous cousin, Astrid (played by Gemma Chan), a supermodel with 15 apartments and a penchant for shopping, who still doesn’t have it all. And there are the snobby mean Singaporean girls who hate Rachel for bagging Nick and think nothing of gifting her a bloody fish in her bed (no doubt, their version of a horse’s head).We in India who so assiduously consume news of the rich and famous, from devouring pictures of the latest Mukesh and Nita Ambani party to details of the Priyanka Chopra-Nick Jonas engagement to stationing TV reporters outside the Italian venue of Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma’s destination wedding, would be right at home in the theatre watching our very own version of Crazy Rich Asians.Except we aren’t. Our attitude to wealth is far more complicated. We aspire to be like the rich and yet cannot seem to let go of our innate socialist distrust of capital. So much so that a “suit-boot ki sarkar” jibe can send even our most powerful dear leader back into the warm embrace of socialist lip service and discreet crony capitalism. Which may explain why the Indian entertainment that has caught the imagination of the West has been either of the “slumdog’ variety epitomised by Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 or “ganglord” version of the Netflix original Sacred Games.Oddly enough if Satyajit Ray was criticised for selling India’s poverty to the West then equally we are ambivalent, even critical about the showy Punjabi weddings and Mediterranean anniversary party cruises patented by Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar. When Veere di Wedding‘s Swara Bhaskar takes her girlfriends on an all expenses paid first class vacation to Phuket or when Khubsoorat‘s Fawad Khan buys a palace in Rajasthan or even when Aisha‘s Sonam Kapoor and company sport as many as 60 Dior dresses through the movie, we go slack-jawed with surprise.It could also be that our own very rich people, despite their tall towers and serial engagements, keep a lid on the exact costs of their extravagances, invariably turning up for darshan next day at Siddhi Vinayak, as if to seek penance for the excesses they’ve indulged in. T.S. Eliot said humankind “cannot bear very much reality”. In an India where 1% of the population owns 73% of the wealth, perhaps humankind cannot bear too much fantasy? It is enough to make Karan Johar weep.Kaveree Bamzai is a journalist and author.