March 18, 2024
I am poor today; more in mind than in pocket, though the tailored-cut cave in propriety finds the flesh of the feeble hand clutching the unseen stitch tightly. What has made me feel riven, I don’t know? I have a good bank balance, enjoy the razzle, drive in obnoxity as it’s the driver who drives, and I can be the crow cawing literally on weekends when impertinence and me are a pas de deux. But, I feel poor today!
Maybe I am stuck around the wedding mess. If marriages are made in heaven, I personally saw ‘heaven’ arriving all ritzy and palmy at ‘Anant Ambani-Radhika Merchant’ pre-wedding bash at Jamnagar, Gujarat. Did anyone once think about the ‘petit bourgeois’ or the ‘Nouveau Rich’ who are coaxed to believe that,
‘Heavens are busy in fixing hearts above. It’s the hell you need to manage on the ground.’
But not after the reticulated symposium of peridot necklaces and the rough & tumble couture; the make-belief somehow shuddered for many. Well! I am a pipsqueak in this entire arrangement and let me be clear; neither I am jealous or po-faced but simply pontificating how disparities ridicule the sense of belonging when hearts co-join—some in isolation and some in the backdrop of a revue.
So, my mind feels poor in contemplation of perfect sanity; is it the adequacy of power that shows no regret to spend exorbitantly or plays on the self-justifying sonorous divide between the conscious of rich & poor?
The palaver nevertheless impinges, not as a radical traitor but as a territorial fight of immiscibility.
We initially had the marriages of the ‘Rich’ & marriages of the ‘Poor’, in consideration to their capacity to spend. Now we have the explicit raison d’etre—marriages with a perpetuity to detach oneself from normalcy, refined in the physiognomy of fixed grimace, impressionistic to the core and above all a declaration,
‘We are different and the desirable sing the cadence of our wishful thinking’.
A phantasmagoria for most of us, unnerving that such wealth has an incessant pre-occupancy to indulge that sometimes our impulsions to sustain run short to combat the delusionary life. Hence the ‘poor me’ stands pellucid understanding what is so different happening?
‘Rihanna’ the Barbadian singer arrives to Jamnagar with all pomp & pageantry, not to miss the loaded luggage reminding me of the cattle trucks. She was indeed graciously pardoned for misaddressing the bride’s name making ‘ki’ and ‘ka’ irrelevant. After all, it was not the archetype intolerant Indian ‘new poor’ wedding where such impudence is spearheaded with a riotous. I mean, c’mon atleast Diljeet paaji caught the correct nuance of ‘majama’ which definitely lead to a lot of ‘maza aana’. Wasn’t it a different world and a different ‘Rich’ and us the ‘new poor’? Let’s not flinch or be gnarled; we all felt like holding up our hat in the stormy weather.
The distinction came on clearly. We were the spectators piquantly stuffing our nostrils with something unrelatable. I was instantly reminded of my ‘Mercedes’ parked in the basement—was it enough to be called ‘Rich’? There was definitely more to it now.
I guess the wherewithal at the Ambani Wedding taught me a lot about the parity we try to bring between the rich & poor but it shatters like a glass in a hailstorm. For us its eccentricity, for the undeterred rich, its inaccessibility! They don’t want to be reached or importuned, thus all the drama & drag. The boundary is a revelation of their impending need to separate the cheese & chalk.
To be true, it was an instant rush of recondite distress that took over me as I watched the three-day rissole of rodomontade and the poppy-cock judgments of the media on ‘How wealth looks immaculately dressed’? Or ‘If hysteria has a new name’?—the so called or look like invincible walking the sun-beamed tresses of unknown profligacies. Was it really a marriage festivity or a sine qua non to lay the inequities in glory, abstruse to the eye that watched the drama unfold?
Let’s ask ourselves
- Are we ready to bear this impasto of factitious strokes that brush off the normal ‘stick & rice’ as the chimera?
- Or be influenced by the enormity of the ‘Ambani’ weddings & likes, and the incoherent display of plastic smiles and the ‘wealth catharsis.’
Are we not piling a lot on the ‘Rich rich’ cause celebre? The ‘new poor me’ asks if ‘richness’ is actually the inherent desire to awaken from the poverty of an imbecile mind? That’s what it is!
I plan to stick to it and so should you all.