For richer India laps up $600m mega wedding

To many in India, it is hard to remember a time when the Ambani wedding wasn't taking place.

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen

The marriage of the son of India's richest man, the billionaire Mukesh Ambani, to the daughter of a millionaire was never going to be a humble affair. The industrialist is worth an estimated $120bn (£92bn) and over the years the Ambani family has not shied away from flashing its cash extravagantly, whether on the world's most expensive home -a 27-storey skyscraper mansion that towers over Mumbai - or on what was previously India's most expensive wedding, spending almost $100m on their daughter's nuptials in 2018, where Beyoncé performed.

Yet even for the Ambani family, the months-long celebrations that have built up to the wedding of the youngest son, 29-year-old Anant Ambani, to Radhika Merchant, the daughter of a pharmaceutical tycoon, have reached pinnacles of opulence.

The event has dominated headlines, in India and globally, for months, with the actual three-day wedding beginning yesterday in Mumbai. Estimates say the fivemonth wedding spectacle is likely to cost upwards of $600m - an eyewatering sum that still accounts for only 0.5% of the Ambani fortune.

In domestic media, which has obsessively reported the affair, it is now regularly referred to as "India's own royal wedding", a nod to the status that the Ambani family holds, with everyone from Bollywood stars to the country's most powerful politicians seemingly at their beck and call.