Poverty Beneath The Feast

From Egypt to Japan, global communities are embracing smaller celebrations to escape debt. In Kashmir, the shift could be life-changing.

- Nusrat Hassan

Every society carries its own contradictions.

In California’s Silicon Valley, you'll find billionaires who wear sneakers with holes. In Rio’s favelas, street vendors build family legacies out of pushcarts. And in Kashmir, people spend millions on wedding feasts while their neighbours live hand to mouth.

The valley, often romanticized for its beauty, lives with a brutal undercurrent: about 35 percent of its people live below the poverty line.

You wouldn't guess this while standing in the middle of a Kashmiri wedding.

Gold bangles clink with every handshake. Food is served in such excess that leftovers could feed an entire village.

For many families, the wedding is a staged performance, a costly declaration of status.

But behind these grand celebrations is an uncomfortable truth: many families sink under debt to keep up with this social show.

They sell ancestral land, take out loans, and exhaust life savings, to meet the expectations of a society obsessed with display.

And the poverty gap widens in the shadow of these choices.

This isn’t unique to Kashmir.