Two crore rupee watches for the groomsmen, what the hell!
A Rs 3 lakh wedding card, I mean an exquisitely carved wooden cabinet with a mini silver temple inside.
$10 million for Justin Bieber to sing Love Yourself and getting guests to sing along.
A Rs 5,000 crore wedding war chest.
CPM honcho Thomas Isaac called the wedding weekend an “ostentatious expenditure” that was “a sin against mother earth and the poor”. Dial it down Comrade, it’s Mukesh’s money, not yours. To put the gwap in perspective, the bridegroom himself is worth more than $40 billion.
Poverty is a relative concept: 77 per cent of BPL Indians own mobile phones today. In 1950, when India became a Republic, 45 per cent of the population was below the poverty line, according to the first National Sample Survey. Mukesh Ambani watches Bollywood movies at home for hours on end: he said it was his escape.
For three days, the average Indian’s escape from drudgery was watching the shaadirama being streamed into their drawing rooms through Whatsapp, YouTube and Instagram; until they realised Jio has the License to Bill: it hiked tariff by 12.5 to 25 per cent as guests quaffed vintage champagne flown in by private jet. The nation was vicariously invited to a fairytale fete of capital and capitalism.
Though I don’t know Nita bhabhi, her husband was a distant acquaintance in 1990 when his legendary father was alive; obviously it wasn’t good enough to get me a silver temple in a box. At the party where Nick Jonas has wearing a Sabyasachi sherwani, I wouldn’t have known what to wear anyway. Hypothetically, I could’ve simply grooved like an extra while multivitamin hero Ranveer Singh danced to his own song Tattad Tattad, and got confetti allergy.
Moral relativists don’t care much about Croesus’s problem. Their grouse is whether it’s ethical to splash crores on a nuptial event in a democracy where food inflation rate is 9.55 per cent in June, up from 4.55 per cent in June 2023? Is it cool to have the A, B, C List of global dudes at a three-day wedding weekend? Is it kosher to commandeer a military airfield—can they even do that?—to park private jets arriving from all over the world? Morality is no longer a binary concept; it has more than 50 shades of grey. Godi media went on ostentatious overkill since a billionaire wedding takes popular attention away from bothersome stuff such as NEET, unemployment, inflation, TDS willfulness yadda yadda yadda.
It’s complicated. The Wedding of the Century concerns a philosophical debate on hedonism. A bunch of smart Greeks went nuts trying to figure it out. Socrates believed the ultimate aim of human activity is happiness. For Heraclitus, reality is composed of opposites, where a continual process of change is what keeps it at rest: it could be interpreted as a constant change of clothes at weddings. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a life in a state of happiness (eudaimonia) is the best life: “happiness” being an activity or a way of living your life, not just having chole bature while fuming at Chef Martinez’s avocado emulsion and Peruvian corn and pistachio tiger’s milk served at the Ambani nuptials.
Never mind the crony Socialists, Greek philosophy foresaw their plans before Christ. Now, plans are afoot to take the gala espousals to London: exporting the Bigger Fatter Indian Wedding will make the East India Company spin in its grave. Lage raho Mukeshbhai. India is cheering for your crony Socialists Mukeshbhai, Greek philosophy foresaw your plans centuries before Christ. That’s a big happy deal; more money in the economy and gives the license to bill.