Sapna K Sangra
So the Virat-Anushka’s Italian wedding continues to be the buzz word as we step into 2018. God willing, we will also be sharing, commenting and liking their star kid/s in a few years from now as we are already doing for Baby Tiamur. I don’t want to sound like a sadist and I agree, when people dream, strive and work hard; they have every right to enjoy the fruit of it all that comes in different forms viz. higher incomes, name, fame…anything and everything that perhaps enhances our ego and furthers our capabilities. If I had the wealth that the duo probably has, I would have even gone a step further and might have just invited the entire Film-Industry-Cricket-World to Italy itself because ordinary people like myself can afford to do the extraordinary things and go unnoticed but extraordinary people can’t take chances for their lives are closely followed and in whatever they do, they set an example. Both Virat and Anushka though having risen from the Middle-Class Families are invariably the Celebrities in their own right who chose to have a private wedding with a selected few for the reasons best known to them and they chose Italy to be the destination for the wedding. How does an ordinary person like me make sense of this extravaganza? Should they not have chosen a different path and made it a simpler affair? Even if they did what they did, should they not have kept the whole affair actually private given the graded society that we are?
I think somewhere we all accepted the fact that Indian Media is so problematic, they wouldn’t have had it easy in India. So to keep the media at bay pushed the two to have it outside India. Fair enough but it wasn’t just limited to that. The so-called secret, the super-exclusive wedding wasn’t just actually a secret affair. It wasn’t meant to be those ways. Had it been so, the little details that started unfolding on social media wouldn’t have come out. The idea was to create hype about the whole affair as if it wasn’t a wedding but something beyond that which it was; it was an Event so to say. Events lead to far-reaching changes and this wedding was successful at creating a class of people who would want to follow suit but may have to settle at a little less given the resources that it involved.
Ordinary people who have just been swayed away by technology having the smartphones in their hands with some Jio offers and who are seen uploading Bhangra videos every now and then are the first ones to be impacted by their Vire di Wedding. I was surprised receiving a Whatsapp message with the photoshopped picture of the duo honeymooning at Kathua Railway Station. The impact is visible! Ordinary people are awed and dream of such fairytale weddings. The idea of getting married at one place and holding receptions for a different set of people at different locations get floated away. They get familiar with the brand names such as Sabyasachi and Shaadi Squad, the Heritage Jewellery etc.
Virat Anushka coming from the middle class as I said earlier did not quite exhibit middle-class values which I think are still holding the Indian Society. Saw a couple of videos in which Anushka Sharma talks about her ordinary yet disciplined life in Cantonments but she quite disowned her own people in the Barracks by setting standards way beyond their limits and expectations. She should have been mindful of the emotions of her own relatives, friends that she grew up with; shouldn’t she have considered the fact that extravagant marriage would only mean demeaning and disrespect them, it only means creating boundaries; it only means showing them the gap that now comes to exist between their lives. And even if this was her well thought out decision irrespective of my interpretation, the duo should have chosen to keep things under cover. Virat Kohli in one of his interviews said that life’s ups and downs are quite embedded in his memory like living in a rented apartment etc. Who knows what exactly has been his motivation in reaching where he has but having carved a niche for himself, one can still choose to be humble. I am happy for the fact that some ordinary people are able to live some of their dreams given the lives the two lead before attaining stardom and going for big fat weddings are no longer just in the destiny of the big business houses and politicians; one can still choose to be close to the ordinary people more so after becoming an extraordinary.
When Marriage is a union of hearts, it wouldn’t matter if the Pheras are in Dhoti-kurta and Saree in a temple in India or in Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s wedding ensemble with Heritage Jewellery in Italy. But then, it’s our Indian Society that gives us our materialistic goals and at the heart of it all is exhibiting that one is superior to others. As I said, the fact that every little detail was coming out, was because it was planned that way. Sabyasachi giving details of Anushka’s wedding lehenga, the number of Karigars who had worked on that and the number of days spent doing each dress, the cost of the same and that of her Jewellery isn’t the prerogative of the designer. The wedding planners sharing their detailed experiences and the challenges they faced in maintaining secrecy till the actual event taking place wouldn’t come out just like that. Be it the designers or the event planners, they are paid for their work which could be kept a secret if they are directed but in this particular case, it wasn’t meant to be. Had it been so, you and I wouldn’t have known, for instance, as some news reports claimed that the wedding venue for the Virat-Anushka nuptials- Super-exclusive Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany charges somewhere around Rs13 Lakh a room for a night.
Now this marriage has created an issue for an ordinary family like ours. Earlier it used to be just my husband and now I am in tune too telling our son, “Spending a day watch Cricket or Football wouldn’t get you bucks for an Italian Wedding like that of Virushka…ordinary people have ordinary battles that still revolve around Roti, Kapda, Makan and now education in addition and they have to toil to accomplish even that much …”
(The writer teaches Sociology at the University of Jammu and is the State Chairperson of SPIC MACAY)
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