A Wedding Puts India’s Gilded Age on Lavish Display
A Wedding Puts India’s Gilded Age on Lavish Display
Many Indians cheer the rise of moguls like Mukesh Ambani, whose son’s wedding has become a global spectacle. To them, India’s poverty is predictable, but such opulence is not.
Well that's one way to see it.
The company has attracted controversy for reports of political corruption, cronyism, fraud, financial manipulation, and exploitation of its customers, Indian citizens, and natural resources.[11][119][13][14][120] The chairman of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, has been described as a plutocrat
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliance_Industries#Criticism_and_controversies
8 subsections for 'Criticism and Controversies'
The article doesn't go super easy on the family, although it omits the company's abuses:
In 2000, India had nine billionaires, according to Oxfam. Now, India has 200 billionaires, who collectively hold around $1 trillion in wealth, according to Forbes — nearly a quarter of the country’s 2023 gross domestic product.
A recent study about wealth and inequality in India subtitled “The Rise of the Billionaire Raj” found that the total wealth of billionaires has steadily increased from under 5 percent of national income in the 1990s to more than a fifth in 2022.
The Ambani family’s wealth and influence are so unquestioned that even the use of public resources to aid his private festivities can be a source of pride. In March, the pre-wedding function they hosted in Jamnagar, a town in the western state of Gujarat where Reliance’s oil refinery is based, threatened to overwhelm the town’s small domestic airport.
To Ms. Venkatesan, the celebration was about more than the wealthy getting wealthier; she was bothered by what she called the “valorization” of this kind of wealth.
It’s not just the mind-boggling rise of billionaire wealth that is new, but also the way that wealth has created a new kind of royalty in a country well acquainted with maharajahs.
Like yesteryear’s royal families, today’s billionaires are increasingly keeping their wealth within their class — either through dynastic succession or by marriage.
The rich party away while the world burns...
This is an obscene display of wealth
Oh c’mon! A wedding costing a half billion is just what you do these days!
If you spent less on the avocado toast and bothered to return to the office you could have wedding like, too.
That wedding is nothing but absolutely showoff of wealth
Ironically so, so tacky. Imagine being on the guest list, "Yo, so I can't make it and please don't let anyone know I was invited. Thanks."
They got the Mumbai city police to restrict or outright block traffic on some busy streets during the week of the wedding celebrations. The police commissioner describes the event as a 'public event' in his order.
Mumbai is the financial capital of India and its demography consists of one of the biggest metropolitan populations in the world, with everyone from the richest billionaire to the poorest of slum dwellers. The streets and trains are extremely busy and packed to their last square inch even on holidays. And then these filth block off these roads for a week!
Needless to say, ordinary people and business owners are livid. But these scum have so much wealth and even an autocratic government as their servants that they don't care about what others think. It's an obscene display of wealth, corruption, undeserving power and an outright FU to the regular citizens.
Non paywall linky: