State dinner: Who's at the head tables?

Just as it is when you finally make it past the velvet rope, only to find that there's another, more exclusive VIP room... so it is with the nation's most coveted invitation, a White House state dinner. A few hundred get to attend, but only a handful get to sit with the president and first lady. At Tuesday's dinner for India, some obvious picks for the prime seats -- the prime minister's daughters and a Nobel laureate at Michelle Obama's table -- but also some surprising ones: Hollywood titan David Geffen, and his boyfriend Jeremy Lingvall at President Obama's table.

PRESIDENT'S TABLE
Mrs. Gursharan Kaur, the wife of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass)
Ambassador to India Tim Roemer
Mary Johnston, Roemer's guest (likely a relative of his wife, Sally Johnston Roemer)
Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Paul Pelosi, her husband
David Geffen, the Hollywood titan
Jeremy Lingvall, Geffen's boyfriend

FIRST LADY'S TABLE
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
Amrit Singh, the prime minister's daughter, an ACLU lawyer in New York
Upinder Singh, another daughter, a professor at University of Delhi
Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel-prize winning economist, now at Harvard
Emma Rothschild, Dr. Sen's wife, economic historian, now at Harvard
Gen. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State
Alma Powell, his wife
Rep. Howard Berman, (D-Calif.)
Janis Berman, his wife

CORRECTION, added Dec. 18: Because of a last-minute seating change, the Reliable Source column in the Nov. 25 Style section misstated some of the seating arrangements for the previous evening's White House state dinner. Colin Powell and his wife, Alma, were seated at President Obama's table; Hollywood mogul David Geffen and his boyfriend, Jeremy Lingvall, sat with Michelle Obama.