One evening in June, I found myself heading off to one of Manhattan’s more elegant residential oases to be wined and dined for a good cause. My hosts had donated their hearth and hospitality to the Asia Society, an American organization that promotes awareness of Asia among well-heeled and better-traveled New Yorkers.

This particular event was called “Asia on My Mind,” though I must say the mind seemed less engaged than the stomach. Philanthropists long ago discovered that the most agreeable way to a benefactor’s wallet is through his palate—and thus is Manhattan’s social life organized. Virtually every night of the week, so-called benefits draw the city’s glitterati, willing moths to a sumptuous fire. My Asia Society do was but one of 30 dinners that evening, raising $150,000. Elsewhere, the YMCA of Greater New York threw a dinner for 700 at the swank Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, garnering $800,000. Two nights earlier the Whitney Museum of American Art corralled 250 leaders of the business “community,” whatever that is, pulling in $1.4 million in contributions to the arts, or at least to the Whitney.

Mind you, this was an off-night, a Wednesday. Over the racier weekend, three other events made the city’s society pages. Two days after the Whitney’s gala, a more modest gathering produced $80,000 for the rather more obscure Olana museum. A whopping 850 guests dared monsoonal rains (virtually wading through a flooded parking lot) to net $800,000 for the Fresh Air Fund. Grandest of all was the annual Conservatory Ball, held by the New York Botanical Garden in tents pitched around the greensward. Trailing ball gowns and ruffled skirts got soaked as the heavens oped, prompting guests to raise not only champagne glasses but also hems—along with about $1.5 million.

Such events are not usually so grand. Typically they take place in the ballroom of a big hotel, with several hundred guests scattered (discriminately) among several dozen tables, all sporting more black and white than you’d find at a penguin convention. Hosts, I find, rightly assume that their guests will attach more importance (and therefore drop more cash) to dinners they have to dress up for. Chalk it up to some inexplicably Calvinist correlation between discomfort and cachet.

And it’s an assembly-line cachet. As you arrive, elegant but harried young ladies check your name against a list and consign you to a table that instantly announces your place in the social pecking order. (Pity the crestfallen young man who must inform his glamorous date that they are at Table 44—over there, just behind that column—especially if he’s been talking up his clout.) Then comes the cocktail reception, where a crush of self-important social climbers desperately rub shoulders with the evening’s celebrities, who quite often sequester themselves behind velvet ropes in a private room.

A glass or two of Perrier is balm for bruised egos, before diners are herded into the ballroom for vacuous speeches and insipid dishes. Rubber chicken, everyone? Yet again, someone (if not several someones) is “honored,” “saluted” or “awarded,” usually for the accomplishment of being alive and having a name that helps persuade others to come and spend money.

Why do people go to these things? Rather like George Mallory, who said he climbed Everest “because it’s there,” most attend because they are expected to. After a dozen years of reluctant attendance myself, I have yet to find someone who actually claimed to enjoy himself. Instead, the guests are there because their company bought a table or the hosts are the beneficiaries of corporate charity or the cause being honored is worthy even if the keynote speaker is not. Some attend because the event counts as a charitable tax write-off, some because they want to be seen, others in order to feel they have dined with a notable and most because networking is the American way.

On one occasion I found myself seated next to a woman who looked so ostentatiously bored that I had to ask why she had bothered to come. “Because my husband is here,” she confessed. “My husband is here because his boss is here. His boss is here because he has bought a table. He bought a table because his company helps sponsor the charity that is winning a third of this evening’s awards. And that means I will have to sit through the speeches of the earlier awardees...”

I nodded sympathetically, but did not tell her what, a few minutes earlier, her husband had confided to me. “It’s one of the few perks the company offers my wife,” he explained. “You know, a chance to mingle with the celebs, see her favorite TV anchor emcee the evening, enjoy some five-star food and wine. I’m really here for her.” I poured her more champagne.

Tharoor, a senior U.N official , is author most recently of “Riot” .