Well, the mock auction conducted by Christie's at the Taj hotel on Thursday evening was mostly about imagination. Mock, because there wasn't any real money involved, nor were there any artifacts. Just tantalising brochures which invited Mumbai's glitterati to a rough equivalent of the `guess the weight of the cake' game.

Conducting the auction was, who else, Christie's, who've sold everything from Rembrandt to Rock n' Roll. Suave auctioneer Lord Poltimore laid out the ground rules. Here's how the great guessing game was played. Over dinner, guests at the 30-odd tables in the Taj Ballroom received brochures detailing 10 antiques auctioned by Christie's in London last year. The dozen guests at each table were given an imaginary sum of 384,000 pounds, the challenge being to estimatethe actual hammer price of each antique.

``This is like a management course,'' chortled an executive brasshat, between discussing corporate mergers and boardroom brawls. ``This is fun,'' says Jonathan Holmes, partner in Korn & Ferry International, between filling out his bid.

Only the prizes were real in this game of imagination. The first prize, a weekend at the hotel's presidential suite. ``With whom?'' a curious guest piped up. The second prize a weekend at the Taj Club and dinner at the Zodiac Grill for second runners up. And under the hammer, in this case finger taps on Lord Poltimore's microphone, were the following - a Jamini Roy canvas, an 1854 four anna stamp, a 19th century Agra carpet, an 1821 Thomas Daniell canvas, a 16th century Ming dish, Clive's turban ornament, a 19th century Anglo-Indian armchair, the Gandhara statue, a 17th century Mughal miniature and an innocuous wine bottle.

``Politicians, bankers, shipping magnates, no one's ever got it right (the prices),'' the auctioneer chuckledgleefully. But no one really cared as the guessing game had the social brigade on their feet asking for more. The meticulous ones calculated on cell phones while the wanton let their imagination run wild.

And wild it was. For half an hour the chaos resembled the frantic floor trading in stock exchanges. ``Twenty, twenty-five, thirty...'' Poltimore swung around eliciting bids from the ecstatic tables dotting the ballroom, before the denouement.

But the actual prices took the wind out of many a sail. Everybody's favourite Gandhara statue chiselled 200 years after Christ, had been sold for a cheap 37,000 pounds, while an innocuous 53-year-old Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine bottle had been sold for a whopping 65,000 pounds. Lesson number one, ``Age is not always the criterion in evaluation,'' Poltimore informed. More shockers, the Thomas Daniel which everyone overlooked, was sold for 139,000 pounds, the turban ornament for 85,000 pounds.