Satire | Why I didn’t write about the Ambani wedding

It started in January. That’s when people started asking me: aren’t you going to write about the Ambani wedding? By March it had become: when are you going to write about the Ambani wedding? By June, it was: why are you not writing about the Ambani wedding? And on July 10, I received a petition signed by 700 former judges, 800 ex-IAS officers and 900 retired celebrities beseeching me to write on the Ambani wedding. I still wasn’t going to.

But two days later, I got a call from a senior PR executive offering me ₹3,600 for doing a column on how such weddings has saved the Indian economy. My father and mother urged me to take it, as it’s a lot of money. With inflation being what it is, it would have comfortably covered our monthly bill for milk and kariveppilai-kothamalli.

But I declined the offer. I’ll explain why. First of all, it’s about over-saturation. Regular readers of this column would know I’ve written about every celebrity wedding I’ve attended, except my own. I’ve done a column on how Virushka honoured me at their wedding celebrations in Tuscany, about how I served dhoklas at Isha Ambani’s wedding, and how I danced with PriyanJonas at their sangeet ceremony. I’ve done it all. Why devote yet another column to yet another celeb wedding and dilute the gravitas of my personal brand?

Second, it’s a matter of personal ethics. Someone informed me that another PR firm had offered an Instagram ‘content creator’ ₹3.6 lakh for the same deal. Though she had rejected it, the offer was now public knowledge, and it would have been unethical of me to ruin the market for Ambani shills by agreeing to serve as one at one-hundredth the market rate.

Third, it’s about audience trust. At a time when public faith in the media is at an all-time high, thanks to the Modi government’s robust commitment to free speech, it would be irresponsible on my part to betray that trust by writing something in return for a material consideration. If I have any journalistic integrity, I should do it without taking their money. After all, it is indisputable that the planet’s grandest wedding has been a wonderful, positive, soul-uplifting phenomenon, from whichever perspective you look at it.

Meagre spending

From a macroeconomic perspective, the wedding, along with the six-months of pre-wedding, has been a godsend. According to data released by the NEET Aayog, the wedding celebrations have single-handedly boosted national consumption by 72% which, in turn, increased our GDP growth rate by 4.38%, adjusted for inflation. According to government-approved data, the unending festivities created employment opportunities (in India and abroad) for hundreds of thousands of workers, ranging from carpenters, cooks, decorators and electricians, to fashion designers, former prime ministers, actors, singers, and Kardashians.

But not everything can, or should, be viewed in purely material terms, least of all the celebration of the union of two young souls and hearts. In fact, this is the main reason I have no time for petty-minded critics who’ve been obsessing over the money spent on the wedding, calling it ‘vulgar’, ‘ostentatious’ and ‘shameless’ in a country that is the world capital of inequality.

Actually, the truth is the exact opposite. Pound for pound, as they say in boxing parlance, or rupee for rupee of net worth, Boss ka Boss has been miserly. He has spent a meagre 0.05% of his net worth on his son’s wedding, whereas the wedding expenditure incurred by the average Indian father is between 150%-180% of net worth (World Bank data). Therefore, people who are calling it ‘extravagant’ and ‘obscene’ are doing little more than hypocritical virtue-signalling.

If I was worth billions

I asked myself a simple question: if I was worth $123.3 billion, would I have acted differently? Would I have held a single, quiet, media-barred, private ceremony attended only by relatives and family friends, and maybe the company staff in India, and a few close friends who happen to be celebrities, and perhaps a few prime ministers who are business associates, and perhaps some American tycoons who are on my board and in whose boards I am, and perhaps a few influencers that my son adores, and perhaps my wife’s close friends from Bollywood? Maybe. But I would certainly not have invited Giovanni Infantino because I don’t care for Italian infants named after Jio.

The bottom line is that the past six months of wedding festivities have been fantastic for the nation, economically and mentally. I’d have liked to say this without monetary inducements. But now it’s too late.

The author of this satire is Social Affairs Editor, ‘The Hindu’.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in