The star of the evening was not the fashion show or the music but faith healer Patrick San Francesco who is also the chairman of Samarpan Foundation. He keeps a low profile but there are many noted Calcuttans who swear by his “healing”. How does he help people? “When people come to me for help, I teach them to draw divine energy from the cosmos. That’s it. I don’t do much,” he smiled. Quite in sync with the definition of the word Samarpan, which means “surrendering your identity to the universe”.

It was an evening of double delight at The Oberoi Grand on Sunday. Calcuttans dropped their weekend plans to show up for a dinner that had a fashion show happening at one end of the hall and a musical performance at the other. All for a cause — Samarpan Foundation’s fund-raising dinner that will help build a 30-bed free hospital in the Sunderbans, benefiting around 95,000 inhabitants of Bali and surrounding islands. And if everything goes according to plan, the hospital should be inaugurated on October 15. t2 stopped by.