Instead, it now vibrates, according to a recent report in the Tribune, to the throaty growl of uber-luxury and obscenely-priced McLarens, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Rolls-Royce’s and numerous other similarly extravagant motors, which have become the city’s new yardstick of status and ambition.

The Tribune’s October 31 report, revealing that 19 of these gleaming symbols of motoring excess were registered in Chandigarh 2020 onwards, is the city’s latest conversation piece. These opulence-on-wheels include a McLaren 750S Spider priced at Rs 4.99 crore, a Rolls-Royce Cullinan at Rs 4.66 crore, a Lamborghini Huracan for Rs 4.12 crore and – at the ‘entry level’ – the Range Rover HSE, costing a modest Rs 2.12 crore.

Collectively, these machines netted the local Registration and Licensing Authority Rs 5.36 crores in fees and road tax, with the McLaren’s proud owner paying Rs 52.44 lakh, the Lamborghini-loyalist depositing Rs 32.97 lakh and the Bentley Bentayga afficionado Rs 30.52 lakh. At the humbler end of the spectrum, the Range Rover set its owner back by Rs 19.14 lakhs in official levies.

“The city’s appetite for plush wheels isn’t new, but the scale has swollen in spectacle,” The Tribune aptly observed. It also quoted city Deputy Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav that Chandigarh’s car registration charts resembled a “luxury showroom”.

“The steady stream of supercars since 2020 highlights the Union Territory’s evolving profile as a hub of high-end mobility,” said the DC of City Beautiful, which is the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. Presently, it boasts more vehicles than people – 14.27 lakh for 13 lakh residents – in a city planned with largely two-wheeled bicycles in mind. More cars were registered in Chandigarh in recent years than motorised two-wheelers.

But what DC Yadav omitted is that most of these imported symbols of overindulgence aren’t driven by their exalted owners, but by liveried chauffeurs – the invisible custodians of vanity in a city where, for its dominant elite, public display isn’t everything – it’s the only thing.

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Such preoccupation with appearances extends well beyond automobiles for these grandees who, in true North Indian swagger, style themselves as the city’s malai – self-anointed royalty. The obsession with display had seeped into every corner of their lives, most conspicuously their pet dogs, who, like their cars, serve as props of prestige. After all, in this city, possession only counts when it is on display, guided by the enduring motto of its car-and-canine elite: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Hence the multitude of pedigreed mutts – many with foreign lineages like Collies, Huskies, Golden Retrievers, Irish Setters and lumbering St. Bernards – are now part of the same spectacle of display, paraded daily by attendants through manicured parks and along the city’s 200 kilometres of bicycle tracks, much as their owners’ cars are flaunted on its broad roads.

And though not every corner of Chandigarh gleams with excess, its formerly restrained, tree-lined neighbourhoods have, in recent decades, morphed into playgrounds for high-rollers – spaces where status is performative and social standing measured by the size and roar of a superbike or sports car’s tailpipe.

Such blatant ostentation masquerading as style is unsettling to many – like this writer, who has observed Chandigarh’s uneasy evolution since its conception in the early 1950s. The city’s founding spirit of hope, restraint and quiet elegance, born of genteel Punjabi refugees rebuilding their lives and their capital to replace Lahore after Partition has long evaporated. These pioneering settler’s heirs and successors have drifted away or chosen the path of acquiescence by quietly opting out, or worse, in some instances, succumbed to the very excesses their forebears had shunned.

“Chandigarh was developed on the unstated but accepted principle that order, proportion, simplicity and purpose could nurture a more rational, equitable and humane urban existence in newly-independent India,” said Gurbachan Jagat, retired Manipur Governor and longtime city resident.

“Sadly, it has all unravelled over the decades into narcissism, vulgar displays of wealth and vanity number plates,” said the 81-year-old former Punjab Police officer, who also served as Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police and thereafter of the Border Security Force. What was meant to embody Nehruvian modernity, he added ruefully, has instead become a shrine to materialism – its quiet dignity drowned in the din of self-display.

Others, like 54-year-old agriculturist-lawyer Deshbir Bhullar – born in Chandigarh but recently migrated to Canada – concurred. He recalled that the city of his youth prized discipline, proportion and grace. “Those qualities are only a distant memory,” he lamented, “the city’s geometry endures, but its soul has been corrupted beyond redemption.”

Meanwhile, the chrome-plated self-absorption visible on Chandigarh’s streets finds an even louder echo in its social life.

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At its nub are the city’s kakas – pampered offspring of agriculturists, bureaucrats, military officers, businessmen and assorted professionals – who constitute Chandigarh’s most visible and self-styled aristocracy, high on horsepower but hollow in intent and intellect. Muscled and body-conscious – many out of well-known public schools – with exaggerated haircuts, designer wardrobes and borrowed accents, the lives of these kakas resemble a Punjabi pop video – loud, excessive, arrogantly self-assured.

Their days are a blur of gym sessions, brunches at gourmet cafés or the iconic Chandigarh Golf Club and tearing down Chandigarh’s orderly streets in their imported cars and motorbikes, their loud exhausts blaring clarion calls of entitlement. The city’s traffic rules bend before them, and if the police ever muster the courage to intervene, one call to “papa’s friend” swiftly restores their impunity.

Their nights unfold in boutique breweries over designer beers and rare single malts, as they consume with practised ease what their parents built with industry, measuring their worth in ‘likes’ on Instagram and Facebook, where their videos appear with compulsive regularity. Their conversations, too, rarely stray beyond themselves – repeated ad nauseum until they no longer need to say anything more to remind everyone of who they are and what they do, or have ever done.

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Alongside the kakas flourish the familiar Gush-veers and Gush-meets – archetypical males and females instantly recognisable to anyone who’s lived here – Chandigarh’s self-anointed custodians of charm and chatter; the city’s idle rich living off vast, albeit questionable, inheritances. Their lives revolve around the unending theatre of sociability, gushing over people they barely tolerate, feigning fascination for tales heard a dozen times before and perfecting the art of looking delighted as they do.

These middle-aged, paunchy Gush-veers, with thinning hair and inflated egos and their equally unprepossessing and overdressed Gush-meet counterparts float from one soirée to the next, through gaudy drawing rooms, manicured lawns and club terraces. Invariably, their laughter is  a notch too loud, their smiles a shade too fixed and their compliments too exaggerated.

At these gatherings, they pose with stemmed glasses of wine or bubbly, exchanging air kisses while silently ranking handbags and husbands – each gesture part of an unspoken contest of oneupmanship, dressed up as sophistication. But their true performances begin later, when dissecting who’d fallen out with whom, who’d been snubbed, who’d gone broke and the clincher: who was dumping who, and for how much.

Their survival, too, depends on proximity to power – senior bureaucrats, politicians, real-estate tycoons and businessmen capable of making them feel they matter. Yet, the handful who see through these poseurs and challenge them are castigated for being too judgemental, cynical, or simply not social enough, and quietly blacklisted.

For, in a city that mistakes brashness for charm and flattery for warmth, criticism or calling someone out isn’t conversation – it’s treason, plain and simple. Chandigarh’s social calendar that once prided itself on intellect and restraint, it seems, has now room only for sparkle.