As kids, a friend and I were stretching time by browsing at a stationery shop, testing the grip of the latest Inoxcrom, when I asked her how rich she wanted to be when she grows up. A dirty question. We were in Dubai, where the heat would build so intensely that the only place to go was malls, those cauldrons of unfulfilled desire, cool and as aspirational as impossible.
She shrugged and said: rich enough to not think twice about which pen she could buy. It was an answer girded by an evident assumption. That much of our material lives is spent negotiating this trade-off—if I get this, then I cannot get that; the story of everything we have is simultaneously an elegy to all the things we burnt in the bargain.
There, however, comes a point when this awareness might dim, even cease. You can get this and that. The and-ness proliferates like a cancer, the gap between a demand and its fulfilment snapped shut, the distinction between want and need crumbled to dust.
It is somewhere along this stretch that the recent Anant Ambani-Radhika Merchant wedding festivities lie. Two pre-wedding celebrations, one in Jamnagar, one on a cruise between Italy and France; a wedding with more events than Hum Aapke Hain Koun could even imagine; and guests from across the world, from ex-Prime Ministers to reality TV stars. The wedding just got over as I write this, but I am told more festivities are coming in the weeks ahead: some post-wedding cheer, some more roads to block, more news feeds to clog.
A silly headline asked, “If Mukesh Ambani spends Rs.3 crore every day, his wealth will end in…” A bait. Obviously, I clicked. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation yielded 932 years. What does this number mean? To us or even them. If the very idea of poverty feels inconceivable, how can they even make sense of being rich since, after all, we derive our sense of things from contrasts? Groomsmen given watches worth Rs.2 crore; Anant Ambani wearing a Rs.14 crore brooch; diamonds holding Nita Ambani’s hair bun together; Rs.6,600 crore worth of wedding jewellery; women lugging emerald bricks around their neck, head high, neck still in place, the posture slightly bent.
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Reports suggest this was a Rs.5,000 crore wedding, give or take a few hundred crores. At some point, these numbers stop making sense. At some point, the Ambani wealth has turned abstract, a concept. A material reality has consequences. A conceptual reality only has iterations.
This is, after all, the illusion they wanted to create. To make us believe that they exist beyond the shackles that make our lives, other lives, real. They want us to think that they are in a movie that they have produced, directed, and starred in, a movie that turns A-list Bollywood stars into supporting foot soldiers, extras in a crowd scene; Kim Kardashian into a Didarganj Yakshi; Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Katy Perry, Rihanna into a rolodex of names and special appearances. All in a movie that furnished its own readymade audience—us.
The Ambanis have single-handedly turned India into their unwilling spectators—a houseful spectacle if there ever was one. The French theorist Guy Debord writes in his book The Society of the Spectacle that the spectacle demands “passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”
We live not just in a material economy, but in an attention economy, and our refusal to value our attention—where we choose to deploy it, where we choose to retreat it from—results in a situation where our eyes, our imagination, even our anguish is decided for us. The algorithm’s aim is not to predict the most cunning homepage but to refashion the most pliable mind.
Make no mistake. The wedding was cinema, just not the kind we recognise. And we have all just been recruited, without knowing it, as an audience to the greatest circus trick: a disappearing moral compass.
What unfolded on our timelines over the past several weeks was what Deobard theorised as the degradation from “being” to “having” to “appearing”—where “all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances”. In this dislocation we can locate some of our collective, complicated disgust at the Ambani desire to create a maelstrom and place themselves in the eye of it.
Let us look at the aesthetics for a moment: the mechanical boat with a peacock sculpture on its bow for the bridal entrance, which might get repurposed for the Life of Pi musical playing next at the venue; the rigged lighting on the ceiling that made the whole convention hall look like a film set; the coloured bands that all guests had to wear on their wrists next to, and despite their bespoke jewellery, with the colour of the band revealing a coded hierarchy signifying how close to the Ambanis you could sit; the X marks with red tape on the pink carpet for people to pose for the paparazzi. Everyone knew their place.
Now, what about the act of consuming these images? We were sand-blasted and drip-fed—I do not know how else to describe it. From news magazines to paparazzi accounts to influencers flooding social media algorithms to even the public roads of the metropolis cleared up for the family affair. Access blocked to public roads, public beaches rendered private, employees in the Bandra-Kurla complex, where the wedding festivities took place, told to work from home, a military airport muscled up for the event. The very idea of “public” has been made a mockery of, with even the police and the airforce, accountable to the taxpayer, becoming wedding service providers.
Radhika Merchant Ambani speaks during the second day of her and Anant Ambani’s wedding reception “Mangal Utsav”, organised for the Reliance employees and media, in Mumbai, Monday, July 15. | Photo Credit: KUNAL PATIL
The whole affair is especially insulting because it comes at a time when, according to a new study by the World Inequality Lab, income inequality in India is, in fact, worse than it was under British colonial rule. The top 1 per cent holds more than 22 per cent of the country’s income and 40 per cent of the country’s wealth. Mukesh Ambani’s wealth alone is around 3 per cent of India’s GDP. At a time when the tax structure should demand a stricter, more equitable distribution of wealth, there is an accumulation by the private of the public.
That the Ambanis can stage this grotesque display of wealth in the midst of a period of intense inequality shows how confident they are of people buying into the spectacle and refusing to see it as anything but a spectacle. That we will never retrace the steps from “appearing” to “having” to “being” and rage at how this became possible. That the necks will always be the place to display one’s wealth, never one’s rage, one’s disgust.
Disgust is a strange feeling that takes over the body. According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, disgust might come primarily from a property of things, such as a bad smell or a pus-like consistency, which reminds us of our “abnormality and mortality”. There is a phobia at the root of such disgust and something evolutionary about it—say, our disgust at the smell of rancid milk that prevents us from consuming it.
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But disgust can also come from us projecting these properties onto other people, say, by associating a certain demographic of people with being smelly. These are the kinds of disgust we must attempt to overcome, to struggle against.
Nussbaum also suggests that sometimes what we are feeling might perhaps not be disgust but anger. Because at the root of anger is the desire to correct, whereas at the root of disgust is the desire to eliminate or, alternatively, to remove yourself from that space.
I believe the moment we are experiencing now calls for a rethinking of the very idea of disgust. It is not just how our disgust is defanged by the very fact that most of us are expressing it by using Jio phone packages and data, thus contributing to the very thing we stand against, making hypocrisy our guiding light.
“[A]n insistent feature of the lurid and the sensational”, writes Professor William Ian Miller, is that “even as the disgusting repels, it rarely does so without also capturing our attention…. We find it hard not to sneak a second look or, less voluntarily, we find our eyes doing ‘double takes’ at the very things that disgust us.”
Singer Justin Bieber poses for a photo with Anant Ambani and his fiancé Radhika Merchant during the pre-wedding festivities of the couple, in Mumbai. | Photo Credit: PTI
To keep gravitating towards the very thing that disgusts you blunts the disgust, inflects it with a sterilised self-disgust. It makes disgust appealing and inevitable. How else does one explain the time spent on Diet Sabya or the pages of the various stylists and paparazzi accounts that drank the Kool-Aaid? That we express this disgust through irony makes complete sense because sincerity cannot possibly cut it—sincerity cannot express the rotten joy we get from seeing the whole thing unfold, it does not qualify us turning into spectators, it does not explain how we wait for another event’s lookbook to drop even as we feel exhausted by the piling up of images, of discourse, of disgust. We cannot escape the spectacle, what Deobard calls “the ruling order’s non-stop discourse about itself”.
Arundhati Roy asks in her essay “Capitalism: A Ghost Story” which of us sinners is going to cast the first stone. Noting that she, too, lives off the royalties from corporate publishing, a precarious position, she writes, “If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criteria for stone throwing, then the only people who qualify are… those who live outside the system.” The system is so cleverly broken that to even dissent from within it is to further promote it, to keep it going, giving its lungs another pump of fresh air. To critique it is to find yourself in the odd position of both pointing fingers at the system and at the self, cursed to be both the wronged and the wrong.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online
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