Kya shaadi abhi bhi baaki hai?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In 1994, the film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun became a sort of turning point in India's liberalization story. Where most films end with a wedding, HAHK began with one. It was a prolonged wedding showcase, featuring pre-wedding, during wedding and post-wedding rituals and revelry, including the iconic "didi tera dewar deewana" all of which brought the song total up to a cloyingly excessive 18.

A landmark hit, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun revived Bollywood and also inaugurated an era of wedding couture, wedding planning and all things shaadi, alongside a productified, corporatized Bollywood. Since then Bollywood and weddings have become increasingly intertwined until choregoraphed Bolly-sangeets have become a pan-Indian ritual.

Three decades later, the Ambani wedding is the new Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, or maybe just the far less tentative Hum Aapke Hain. The history of the last three decades is also a particular history of media. The Ambani wedding is possibly the first ever media wedding. But it is not just a wedding carried out in the media. It is media itself. Yaniki, it is not just meta, it is a veritable Meta. It is Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Balaji soaps, news channel, event management, public relations, piracy and local cable channel. It is a vistrit wedding lehenga shaped AI, intricately studded with every media apparatus of the last thirty years and its contents, like music box decorations. Look there's a little SRK and a miniature Ranvir, a mini Modi and a bonsai Ramdev, a wind-up Orry and an automated Arjun Kapoor. Everything feels of a piece, joined by gota kinaris, zircons and emeralds. The biggest of names mill about, junior artists in a party scene, with the family taking centre stage. The biggest stars get only a tiny space to dance a tiny dance, about as big as an Instagram square IRL. Krishna opened his mouth to reveal the entire universe. The wedding is an inside out version of this that subsumes the entire mediaverse into its being.

While commentary on its opulence is expected - even if moral opprobrium is its own form of virtuous ostentation - the scale of the event is a continuation of the eternal upping of the scale ante that defines our times, our movies, our tech. What is far more notable about this wedding through is its duration. Like HAHK it featured a series of pre-wedding events and then numerous wedding events. Now the post-wedding event have begun. The wedding enters the endless scroll of social media in numerous promoted feeds globally, endlessly itemized. But it is also, itself an endless scroll, continuing and continuing. It is hard to imagine it will ever end. Is this... forever?

Capitalism commodifies pleasure and desire to such an extent that it kills our libidinal energy. It subsumes our desires and our sexual energy in the service of its market. We must work hard, party hard, look good, to allow this market to reproduce itself. Gen Z, familiar only with the hamster wheel of dating online can testify to that. We are almost there, but never quite there-love, the big time, acche din. Our supermarkets of choice, our itemized, atomized consumption of emotions and experiences, our constantly turning our own emotions and experiences into consumables. In our endless scrolls of desire, the moment of satiety or contentment is eternally postponed.

Perhaps we have all been attending this wedding long before it began.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com