| Published on 12-03-2007 In National |
| Viewed 2475 times | Written by S. Murari |
| What price mega weddings? |
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Who's Arun Nayar anyway, asks a media commentator. Is this old woman the bride, asks a woman in Jodhpur , looking incredulously at the photo of Elizabeth Hurley. While the commentator frowns on mega weddings and media hype over them, the village woman is unable to believe that the British actor is getting married at the age of 41. She does not know that Liz Hurley is a British actor and that she is marrying a man who is 42, that she already has a four-year-old son. Or for that matter the Indian businessman has only recently divorced his Indian wife to marry Hurley. Never mind the Jodhpur woman. How many of us knew anything of Arun Nayar and Liz Hurley until the media went to town over their courtship?
Celebrities do make news, not just in India, but the world over. Remember how Prince Charles' wedding with Diana was romanticised by the media the world over. The British press, maybe the tabloid, stayed focussed on them right through their unhappy marriage and the affairs of Charles with Camella Parker Bowles and Diana with an army captain were the staple diet for the masses who looked up to the royalty.
In the bargain, even a butler who claimed to be privy to palace peccadilloes made a fast buck. Diana's bare-all interview with the BBC shortly after the breakup attracted worldwide attention.
The tragedy was photographs of Diana working out in a gym got more publicity than her unglamorous campaign against landmines in Cambodia and other battle-scarred places. In fact, the whole story was done to death literally with the paparazzi chasing Diana to a gory, fatal accident in a Paris subway.
What the royalty is to Britain, the corporate moghuls are to the rest of the world. It does not matter whether they are first generation businessmen or industrialists who flaunt their wealth because they lack class. So long as they have money to spend, the urge to splurge, they attract attention, maybe for all the wrong reasons. Be they L N Mittals, Subbarami Reddys, they are not accountable to the people so long as they don't live off their shareholders' money.
Politicians are a different genre altogether.
They dare not show off their wealth, ill-gotten or otherwise, in a country like India where the vast majority is poor. Ms Jayalalitha had to pay a heavy price for the mega wedding of her lately adopted (and quickly disowned) son Sudhakaran.
Two questions arose from what would otherwise have been a private affair. One was the source of money for a person holding public office and drawing a token salary of one rupee a month. The second was the brazen misuse of official machinery for the wedding. When thousands of women turned up at Bargur during the 1996 election campaign, the media took it for granted that even if the AIADMK lost power, Ms Jayalalitha would sail through. As it happened, the people turned up to see the bejeweled Sasikala.
Politics is as much about symbols as about substance. And so, Ms Jayalalitha had to resort to tokenism of sorts after her return to power in 2001 by conducting a mass marriage of over 1,000 poor couples. Never mind if some of them were already married, and thus twice blessed.
Are such glamorous weddings alien to Indian culture? There is no ready answer. Gandhiji propounded the trusteeship concept, which meant that the rich should consider their wealth as people's money and hold it in trust for them. And Tatas and Birlas of that bygone era had old world values and business ethics, which may be anachronistic in this day and age when the end justifies the means.
The media also had a role in promoting values then. Not any more. Let's return to the lavish ceremony that marked Nayar-Hurley Vedic wedding in a Jodhpur palace that followed their equally opulent civil marriage in London. The media was denied access and at least ten were injured when the police and security guards scuffled with the paparazzi trying to snap up the guests attending the lavish wedding feast.
Was the press denied access because the couple wanted it to be a private affair? Oh, no. Exclusive media rights were sold ahead of the event to British celebrity magazine 'Hello!' reportedly for a seven-figure sum. So, it all boils down to money, honey.
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