ALMOST EVERY YEAR for nearly two and a half decades, Shekhar Gupta hosted a party on Diwali.

In 1990, when the tradition started, he was a senior editor at India Today magazine. His home was one floor of a house in a colony near the Indian Institute of Technology in south Delhi, and the party was a modest, intimate affair—a few friends, relatives and colleagues, some of whom lived alone, celebrating the festival with him, his wife, and their two children. There was serviceable, fusty catering, sometimes from the India International Centre, and the guests doubled up as bartenders.