Kya shaadi abhi bhi baaki hai?

In 1994 the film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun became a sort of turning point in Indiarsquos liberalization story Where most films end with a wedding HAHK began with one It was a prolonged wedding showcase featuring prewedding during wedding and postwedding rituals and revelry including the iconic ldquodidi tera dewar deewanardquo all of which brought the song total up to a cloyingly excessive 18A 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 Bollysangeets have become a panIndian ritualThree 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 therersquos a little SRK and a miniature Ranvir a mini Modi and a bonsai Ramdev a windup 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 beingWhile commentary on its opulence is expectedmdasheven if moral opprobrium is its own form of virtuous ostentationmdashthe 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 prewedding events and then numerous wedding events Now the postwedding 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 foreverCapitalism 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 therelove 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 postponedPerhaps we have all been attending this wedding long before it beganParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom