Lest it be said that I was not invited to a wedding by the Ambanis, I have to assert that I was, though there is a twist to the tale. It was decades ago, in 1991, and the patriarch of the clan, in true Dhirubhai style, had sent to the bureau of the business daily where I worked an invitation to attend the wedding reception of his younger son Anil with Bollywood’s lapsed star Tina Munim. Along with it came a box of delicious kaju-katli.
That was a different era. The ones who bit into the kaju-katli included reporters who had done stories critical of the Ambanis’ famous capacity to influence the powers that be. The late DHA loved charm offensives, and the box of sweets was an extension of his personality lived out through his attentive bunch of liaison men whose tentacles extended into newsrooms alongside the corridors of power. No regrets were required, no attendance was expected, I suppose. I recall only the kaju-katli and the largeish golden-hued card.
That was a different era. Anil’s wedding on 2 February 1991 happened in the thick of India’s balance of payments crisis. Five months after the wedding, India flew out 47 tonnes of gold to raise $400 million to avert a foreign exchange shortage crisis. It’s a far cry from Mukesh Ambani flying in a host of global celebrities, including singer Rihanna, this year to a makeshift international airport-on-demand at Jamnagar for the Bollywoodised pre-wedding extravaganza to mark his son Anant marrying Radhika Merchant.
For the record, Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani’s personal net worth is now estimated at $117 billion, though his network is much smaller than that of his father, which included some of us at least by professional extension. In assessing the latest Ambani wedding, we have to make do with viral videos, WhatsApp gossip and Instagram posts in lieu of the kaju-katli.
It was the Beatles’ singer John Lennon who famously told a royal audience that included Britain’s queen mother: “The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Much jewellery has been rattled at Jamnagar’s pre-wedding bash as we heard and saw on the net and the telly. Bollywood-style official videos, Rihanna singing, Shah Rukh/Salman/Aamir Khans dancing in an unlikely union. Even Rajnikanth in attendance. We were so much in shock and awe that we even forgot to crack the obligatory Rajni joke: “The wedding attended Rajnikanth.” But then, this bash or the one held in 1991 are not the wedding-do I regret not attending.
Fate throws curve balls at you. Sometimes, it has a reverse swing. We tut-tut too late about missing a big chance. My chance came in 2009. Smartphones were here, so were selfies, and there was, in hindsight, the occasion of a lifetime. And I blew it. Trust N R Narayana Murthy to underplay everything with his family’s trademark simplicity and spoil our chance.
I received in August 2009 an email from the Infosys founder and chairman, whom I have known directly, a personal note. “Dear Madhavan,” it began, and went on to mention that his daughter Akshata was “getting married to her classmate from Stanford Business School, Rishi Sunak”. It added: “Rishi was born and raised in England.”
I wished Murthy and his wife Sudha all the best for the wedding reception at the Leela Palace in Bengaluru, congratulated him on his “arrival of a different kind” and added I would try to make it, but “it looks difficult at the moment”. I could not, or rather did not, go.
It was indeed an arrival of a different kind. No Bollywood star that I recall being mentioned. No iconic firangi singer. No dancing Khan. Only, the groom happened to be the future prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Having been personally shown around the Infosys campus once by the magnanimous Murthy, and enjoyed his self-deprecating jokes about our middle-class value-for-money culture, the contrast between the two weddings is striking in more ways than one. “Hong Kong shopkeepers don’t like us,” he said once. “They look away because they know we ask for the price and won’t buy.”
Between the Rihanna-infused razzmatazz at Jamnagar and the underplayed—and I suspect unsuspecting—dignity of the Akshata-Rishi wedding, I am kind of confused. It is not for nothing that they say: “For everything you say about India, the opposite is also true.”
The three-day pre-wedding bash for the Anant-Radhika wedding due only in July is estimated at a ballpark figure of Rs 1,000 crore. Whereas I have personally joked with Murthy about an Infosys rival making a corporate acquisition with 2 percent of that amount.
Last month, a picture of Murthy enjoying an ice-cream at a South Bengaluru parlour with his daughter Akshata went viral. We Indians love to gossip as much about opulence as simplicity, as you can see from the Simple Sudha memes going around on Akshata’s mother. What connects us all, perhaps, is our tendency to be argumentative Indians.
As for me, I can only say that between the two wedding invitations from my past, there was one in which I did not even need to express regret, while the other is one I truly regret not attending. I should have found time and put in some labour—though that is not a word Rishi Sunak would appreciate in his current political predicament.
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)
Madhavan Narayanan
Senior journalist