Just a wedding no more

Celeb weddings have become occasions to parade one's power and pelf with the bride and groom only secondary to the scheme, writes Vijaya Sharma.

From the tantalising spread of Rude Food last time to dwell just for a minute on the Lakshmi Mittal wedding splurge. Just for a minute, I promise. I know it is coming out of your ears - the 20 page invite gilded in silver, the wedding wears designed by Abu Jani, Sandeep Khosla, Tarun Tahiliani and who have you, the splurge at the Palace of Versailles to the best of Bollywood which kowtowed to Mittal and even prepared a mock wooing drama of how Vanisha was won over by Amit Bhaia. It is said, 1 billion dollars was spent on flying down the invitees. Well, well, money makes the world go round isn't it.

In India, this perhaps was the wedding most talked about after that of Sahara tycoon Subrata Roy's two son's week-long wedding. That had a London element in it - the orchestra was flown in from London. Reportedly Roy purchased 40 Honda City cars and decided to run 27 chartered flights to carry VIPs from different parts of the country to Lucknow for the two weddings, with everybody from Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Sachin Tendulkar to Aishwarya Rai joining the jamboree.

That passengers who had paid spent hours cooling their heels at airports around the country, is, of course, inconsequential!

Weddings like these have become more of public relations exercises where the hosts make it clear who is in favour with them and who is not by inviting some and leaving out the others, while also stamping in bold the clout they wield in the field of politics, Bollywood and business by parading a who's who who list for the gala weddings, the bride and bride groom being only secondary to the exercise.

Lakshmi Mittal, it is said, left out quite a few influential Asian names from the invite and also Indian and Brit journos who kept harping upon the connection between the 125,000-pound donation to the Labour party and Mittal's acquisiton of the steel plant in Romania. Mittal has always denied the connection and the big man spelt out his distaste for such reporting by not inviting all those who revelled in revealing the details.

And while we are on weddings, here is one you will not have heard of. The year 2002 in India saw the first wedding in filmdom which was telecast live with a heated rivalry erupting between various TV channels down south to telecast the event live. It was the wedding of Malayalam filmstars Samyuktha Varma and Biju Menon on November 21 at Trichur.

The wedding was telecast with advertisement breaks and a leading daily in India, the Hindu reported:

"Some of the questions asked are — which company will sponsor the sacred ceremony of `tying of the thali' and will the couple guarantee the participation of other film stars to boost the glamour element? "

So apart from weddings being THE occasion to hammer in your power and pelf, they are also alternate entertainment choices if you are tired of the 'K' series saas-bahu sagas with diabolial divas who make you feel that all an Indian woman does is plot and scheme against the other female members of the family.

By the way, a television talk show put forward an interesting idea this weekend to rid TV of the saas-bahu sagas. This idea is a real life incident with all the ingredients needed to make it a huge success. The TV show host suggested why not make a serial on Sonia Gandhi. To quote him: "She lost her mother-in-law, her husband, was a foreigner in a foreign land, had the most coveted seat - the prime ministership of India - waiting to be claimed but turned it down with an austere touch - as if it meant nothing to her."

Back here at home, Sonia's decision has overnight turned her in to an icon for the young generation. In a single stroke Sonia has polevaulted from being the Congress president striving to put the house in order, written off by media and the opposition as lacking the ability and grit to ever put Congress on the top, someone who could not speak Hindi to a hero for thousands in the country. "

A colleague said: "She has ensured her name will be engraved forever in the pages of history." Period

Vinatage Amitabh

Another personality who has ensured his place in history is none other than the Big B - Amitabh Bachchan.

This was the third consecutive Friday which saw an AB film release. Milan Luthria's Deewar the Friday just gone by, Farhan Akhtar's Lakshya the Friday before this and Govind Nihalani's Dev, the first of the three in the consecutive series.

We have yet to see a wider range of roles being performed by any other Bollywood star at this age than Bachchan. Even in his heydays, he hardly got to play such a wide variety of roles once he was trapped in the Manmohan Desai-Prakash Mehra-KC Bokadia clique and did some eminently forgettable stuff called Jaadugar, Aaj ka Arjun, among some more trash.

But like vintage wine, he gets better with age. What brings him the plaudits now is the same category of character which brought him fame in his younger days - yes, you guessed it right - the role of the police man. The name "Vijay" for a cop and Bachchan went hand in hand. And even now, his best performances have come when he has played the cop - whether in Khaki or Dev and not strictly a cop, but an Army major in the just released Deewar, where he essays the role of one of the 31 Indian PoWs of the 1971 Indo-Pak war who remain trapped in Pakistan, till date.

These prisoners returned home in the movie, but in real life, they still remain trapped somewhere in Pakistan. Their names will soon perhaps become just footnotes in government records, but for the wives of these soldiers, just 22 or 23 then, and in their 50s and 60s now, life has moved on but the heart is blank and the eyes have turned to stone as the wait never ends...