Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant from their extravagant wedding ceremony.
| Photo Credit: ANI
I am bereft. In mourning, you might say, although I haven’t lost anyone near or dear. But it is difficult to shake off the feeling.
It’s like the end of a World Cup or the conclusion of a superhero movie. You feel drained. Everything that follows is an anti-climax. Something has been taken away, and I will miss it on a daily basis.
What can give us that same high, that same sense of community, that wonderful feeling of knowing we may not be good enough to catch a ball on the boundary line or fly through the air, but there is someone who can actually do these things?
I am referring of course to the pre-wedding and wedding of the century, possibly the millennium. Now that this gadzillion-dollar affair is over (I think – although a post-wedding celebration on a private island isn’t ruled out), and the dancers and singers have gone home and the smiles have been put away, what about the rest of us?
We neither danced nor sang, but we were there in spirit. We followed the breathless updates dinned into us and pored over the photographs brought to our homes by media outlets that are family concerns. Who wore what? Who kissed whom? Who danced out of step, and who were missing from the guest list? It is so dispiriting to wake up the morning after and discover that the air waves and newsprint and phone screens have gone silent or are telling us boring stuff like who shot Donald Trump or how Nehru was responsible for the Indian cricket team’s T20 loss to Zimbabwe.
Many questions remain. Did the stars get paid to attend or did they pay? Why was the Korean film industry ignored?
But we did learn a lot. That so much jewellery exists in the world (economics), and much of it hangs around the necks and other body parts of wedding guests (sport – weightlifting), that a multi-breasted suit is what some women wear while attempting to double body parts (fashion). And more.
Some killjoys say that all that conspicuous overconsumption was ostentatious, extravagant. I disagree. It was nothing of the sort. It kept a nation entertained and brought joy to all those who have nothing in their lives but a loin cloth and a colour TV.
Now that someone has spent the equivalent of the GDP of a small country on a wedding, it releases us from the obligation of doing it ourselves. It is like Usain Bolt running the 100-metres in 9.58 seconds. It can be done, it has been done – now we don’t have to do it ourselves.
Some years ago, the word ‘imeldific’ entered the dictionary. It meant “ostentatiously extravagant, sometimes to the point of vulgarity,” and was a tribute to Imelda Marcos, former First Lady of the Philippines who had 15 mink coats, 508 gowns, 888 handbags, and 3,000 pairs of shoes.
Now a word for an imeldific wedding is on the verge of getting there.
