This is going to be the absolute acid test of whether there's still money in India," said my Bengali journalist friend, as we watched the businessmen, art critics and Mumbai socialites peruse the paintings at Saturday's preview for an auction by Osian's, the Indian art dealers.

India's super-rich have taken a bashing of late - 29 of the 53 Indian billionaires who made last year's Forbes list had dropped off last week's 2009 tally. The signs for this Saturday's auction didn't look too promising. I'm told there were some major buyers present - but it was certainly not a crowd.

Neville Tuli, the enigmatic Londoner behind Osian's, seemed unconcerned. "Of course, like all, we are bleeding," he said. "But we continue to build, for that is the only way to get the system out of its mental depression."

If Tuli sells two-thirds of the paintings - about the same as he was doing back in 2004 - he will count the auction a success. He's hoping the "modern masterpieces" will "do very well", reaching prices close to last year's peak, when some fetched £500,000. "The others may scrape through their lower estimates," he conceded.

Real spending power has not changed quite as drastically as the Forbes list suggests: those lost billionaire fortunes were paper ones based on an overvalued stock market. And it's not necessarily billionaires who will be doing the buying anyway.

"Of course there are buyers," says Tuli, "whether their mindset is emerging from the psychological meltdown is another matter." This Saturday, the hammer will tell.

* Art could be a safer buy than fraud-hit IT firm Satyam, though. "I don't see it's possible for a professionally run company to purchase Satyam," one of India's most experienced bankers told me. No one yet knows exactly what information bidders will be given after they submit detailed expressions of interest on Friday, and the authorities risk their plan for a quick finish backfiring badly. "I think the whole Satyam process is going to end in disaster for the government," the banker warned.

* All the pre-G20 talk of Europe and the US nationalising banks is warming the hearts of bureaucrats who have stubbornly kept the Indian banking sector mostly in state hands. But go to a cash machine of ICICI Bank - privatised in the 1990s - and it's all slick touch-screen action. Go to State Bank of India and you face a machine that looks like it arrived as economic aid from the USSR.