An Indian Bummer.

According to the World Bank (question: who has an account with the World Bank?) 11.9% of the population of India live in poverty. But that only applies if you agree with the World Bank’s measure of poverty, which is any person who lives on less than $2.15 a day (a figure that one can simply inflate or deflate, depending on how much poverty you wish to be aware of, or deem appropriate). I imagine the president of the World Bank, one Ajaypal Singh Banga (Ajay to his friends, all of whom, I suspect, are very rich), gets through quite a bit more than that with every heartbeat. $2.15 is not a lot of money, unless you’re reading this and live deep below the poverty line. To save you the time of finding out what $2.15 would mean to you, it roughly translates as £1.66 which, to put things in perspective, would buy you around a litre of diesel at most British petrol stations; and I think you’ll agree that if you had to live off a litre of diesel a day things wouldn’t look too rosy come your annual check up at the GP.

So, the World Bank says it’s 11.9% of the Indian population, though the Indian Government and State Bank both put the figure more towards 5% which, of course, they would, because they want the world to think they’re doing more about their poverty than they are, an act of mercy you would think would be fairly achievable in a country where 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth. If it helps there is also a World Poverty Clock (don’t ask) which settles on 6% of the population living in poverty but adds, rather helpfully and significantly more scarily, that this equates to 83 million people. And suddenly we’re sitting up in our seats and rolling our jaws back up off the floor. 83 million is, in case you’re quite thick, bigger than the population of Great Britain, and just imagine if every single person in Great Britain lived in poverty; why, it would be even less fun that the not very much fun it already is.

If you multiply that $2.15 by, say, a million, you get $2.15 million (I didn’t even need a calculator for that) and if you then multiply that by, oh let’s just pluck a figure out of nowhere and say 279.06976 then you get to what looks very close to $600,000,000, which is $600 million to you and me. And to you me that is also a very large amount of money. It is more money than you or I will ever see (incidentally, just on the off chance you are reading this and find the idea of $600 million insultingly small then please could you give me some money and I’ll write something nice about you in return?). Indeed, technically it is more money than almost anyone will ever see, as when did anyone ever ask to see that sort of money as cold hard cash? And if I had $600 million and were to decide, just on a whim, to give as many poverty stricken Indians $2.15 for a day then I’d be looking out over roughly 280 million grateful faces and, for a moment, I’d almost forgive myself for thinking I was some sort of a god. It’s strange what money can do to a person.

India is a country that has become defined in part by the yawning, angry gape of its financial inequality. All countries have rich and poor but in India that gap is more pronounced than almost anywhere else in the world. It isn’t so much about the richest of the rich but about just how poor the poorest are: we’re talking ground down, barrel bottomed beggarly, profoundly penurious, necessitous, impecunious and penniless, and not stricken so much as bitten, slapped, walloped, poked, pinched, pummelled and pounded by a kind of poverty that would make even the poorest of church mice pray high to the lord and thank them for the way their life has turned out. Which isn’t great. I suppose it’s better to focus on the poor because if you spend too much time gawping at the super rich it is likely to turn your stomach and make you hiss with some toxic blend of rage and resentment. Poverty is never a good thing to have to see but it looks so much worse when the super rich get going at the other end. Too much money and very little sense, or sense of taste. It’s why Jeff Bezos has been to space. It’s why Elon Musk is a cock. And it’s why some Indian dickhole has just spend $600 million on a wedding.

You could argue than any excessively lavish amount of money spent on a wedding is bound to be a waste sooner or later, but $600 million is just taking the piss. The wedding in question only (finally) took place a few days ago but it has been making news for quite a while, and if you haven’t picked up on it at all or have diverted your gaze to avoid being drowned under a viscous layer of cloying vulgarity then you might want to look away again now. The union in question smacks a bit of a business deal, between the Ambani’s (the head of the family is Asia’s richest man) and pharma tycoons, the Merchant’s. At the centre of this are the youngest Ambani son, Anant and the Merchant daughter, Radhika, both of whom have clearly been brought up to not worry about splashing their wealth about with liberal abandon (the image of an arsonist decanting a jerry can of petrol around a warehouse springs to mind), because that’s what their mummies and daddies have done. Perhaps it’s the only thing they’re really good at: making money, screwing people out of money and then spending money on as much crap as possible; as others would inhale and exhale after nearly suffocating.

The happy-couple-to-be have spent the last few months on a grindingly, almost bleakly ostentatious display of power and stupidity – huge parties, vast dinners, daft outfits, ridiculous bills – all of which add up to one the biggest bits of unnecessary willy waving in recent years. And when you look like the Ambani patriarch, Mukesh, then you can see why they let money do the dirty work: he looks like a toad that has just eaten his mother whole and he clearly has a moral centre marginally smaller than a notably diminutive atom. He clearly wants to be seen to be seen to be are-you-absolutely-sure-you’ve-seen to be spending money left, right and centre and as a by-product he also wants to demonstrate the mysterious correlation between being fat, soulless, ugly and immensely wealthy and having a much more attractive, slimmer and younger wife. His youngest son, in support of this theory, may be set to inherit more money than Cambodia but looks like he makes a living managing a vape shop in Dagenham town centre. He also seems fond of a midnight snack and prefers to take a lift when the stairs would more than suffice, while his new bride on the other hand looks like she’s just won Miss India for the fourth time in a row. By the way, this is not a state of affairs specific to India, it’s just that not many, sorry, none at all, weddings cost this much dosh. I should also mention that I haven’t read once that this is an arranged marriage, but I’ll leave you to speculate on that all you like.

On top of all the food and drink and dancing and embroidery and flash, the Ambani/Merchant wedding fund has managed to scrape up a few extra rupees to pay Rhianna ($7 million) and Justin Bieber ($10 million) to toss their souls to the breeze and warble their usual rubbish for ravenous audiences that will have taken enough photos to fuck Instagram into the next decade. The groom was also seen wearing a $1.5 million wristwatch, which you can be sure was as golden and shiny and crass and awful as pretty much anything you could ever imagine a complete wanker spending that much money on. And he is a complete wanker, the groom. And so are all his family and all the members of the family he’s marrying into, no matter how much they bend their unctuous smiles and flash their impenetrable, whiter-than-virgin-snow teeth and pretend that all of this is alright because, you know, it’s a wedding and they have every right to be happy. And I know they’re wankers not just because of the money but because of the guest list, which obviously featured many Indian families who will all identify as supremely rich and equally garish, but also some surprise super-dicks like Tony and Cherie Blair, Boris Johnson and Kim and Khloe Kardashian. At a ceremony in March they even entertained that creepy little turd Mark Zuckerberg, which somehow says about as much as you need to know about the rest of it.

Naturally, the population of India, and slowly the wider world, have greeted all of this with a mixture of fascination and horror. But while this may be fascinating to some degree it is wholly, emphatically and conclusively an event that reeks of horror and subsequently an unforgivable tragedy of modern civilisation. This has not been a celebration so much as a squirting orgasm of ill-gained money and the most boorish, vacuous, insensitive and witless exercise in spending that money imaginable. It is also a very good example of how money may or may not make you any happier but it certainly makes you more stupid. I’m the last person on earth to offer any thoughts on what makes a happy marriage but I wouldn’t be surprised if this one doesn’t go the distance. If many weddings tend to be overpriced and underwhelming then this sets a new standard, a standard that will not only be hard to top but will guarantee that anyone who does try to fly so high and stoop so low will be considered the new most terrible, tasteless, wasteful arsehole in human existence. I bet it it didn’t say that on the invitation.

G B Burton. 19.07.2024