Spare the middle class, Bollywood. Show us a normal wedding
This past week, whenever I’ve seen a poster or teaser for Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, I’ve looked at all the jewellery, the embroidered lehengas and all the razzmatazz, thinking about how big budget films like these shape perceptions at so many different levels without even realising it.
Negative perceptions. Every time big budget films that have a grand wedding in them are released, I think of all the extra pressure and burden it puts on middle class parents in India, whose perception of how they should conduct their daughter’s wedding is shaped largely by popular media. Who feel compelled to bust up their retirement corpus and take loans just so their daughters’ wedding will look 1/100th of what popular media thinks a wedding should look like. Whose daughters now want "designer lehengas" and kundan jewellery that will probably spend the next 20 years hibernating inside the cage that a bank locker is. No wonder it is taking us ages as a country to even nudge (change is too big a word) the skewed sex ratios in this country.
If a destination wedding is upper class India’s new aspiration index, an over-the-top wedding (basically beyond the family’s pocket), where the bride must look like she’s stepped out of a film set, is what most middle class parents unfortunately work towards. Guests must be fed well, presented with tokens of appreciation, and put up in suitable accommodations with vehicles at their disposal.
When will we have films that celebrate the beauty of a simple ceremony? That say it’s okay to do it your way? That don’t expect you to break your back over appeasing the community. Because, as we all know only too well (and divorce rates will testify), a marriage’s success or failure has nothing to do with a grand wedding.
If it needs to be so grand even when it isn’t affordable, it’s probably leaving behind a trail of debt and loan-ridden parents, and nothing is worth that.