Wed in India

MY middle-class family has watched too many clips of the spectacular weddings of celebrities that even have the power to change social media algorithms. My aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces have now started to hire choreographers to train them to dance on stage in locations other than home so they can have a destination wedding tag. That’s the trend.

- Chinki Sinha

In his Mann Ki Baat episode last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked Indians to wed in India.  The big fat Indian wedding is now a big soft power export. After all, Beyoncé and Rihanna have been paid enormous amounts of money to perform at the Ambani weddings. That sets us up as people who can get a guest list only comparable to a Davos summit. Never mind the poverty that’s often pushed behind giant billboards that advertise schemes and achievements of our country and big weddings that are televised and projected everywhere on social media. 

We are voyeurs. We want to know who wore what and what it cost.  It is all about optics. And optics is what matters in this day and age of social media. Nobody wants to know that a Dalit man was beaten up when he tried to ride a horse at this wedding. That’s not what changes the algorithms across the world.