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Comedian Tabish Hashmi once joked that the wedding of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s son should be a humbling experience for all those flaunting their lifestyle on Instagram. That ‘us’ nobodies should sit on the side and simply observe what actual affluence looks like.
He wasn’t wrong, given the kind of muscle the Ambanis were able to pull, from Hollywood to Bollywood. The spectacle was less a wedding and more a reminder of how far wealth can stretch the idea of celebration. Just the images of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, David Beckham and the Kardashians casually drifting through the venue like guests at some lavish exotic retreat was nauseating to most — and perhaps deeply inspiring to the local elite circles, who must have spent the endless wedding feeling painfully ordinary by comparison.
However, the masses, Indian masses in particular, weren’t moved by that. The masses continued to stage their own versions of spectacle — Bollywood lookalikes lip-syncing to ’90s hits, carefully choreographed nostalgia repackaged as glamour. If anything, it seemed to confirm an older suspicion: that mass culture would always trail behind, reproducing the gestures of the elite in ‘cheaper’, cruder forms — the kitsch in its various manifestations.
