As Indians have spent the past week soaking up the media attention of the most expensive wedding in history, the Ambani family affair has become a national Rorschach test. Some have seen it as an awe-inspiring showcase for India’s growing wealth and rising influence. Others have called it an indictment of its lopsided development; the cost of the wedding, widely reported to be more than $500 million, is said to exceed the annual education budgets of several small Indian states.
Here across the river, in the low alleys and crowded boulevards of working-class Mumbai, the most common reaction to the extravaganza was not resentment toward Ambani but frustration — with a system that catered to the whims of the exalted few but rarely served the wishes of the many.
GET CAUGHT
Stories to keep you informed
Naushad Ahmed, A muscular, middle-class mechanic who runs an auto repair shop on a flood-prone stretch of LBS Road, wondered how the city could pour resources into the Ambani wedding but fail to address basic infrastructure. He wanted potholes filled. He begged for a solution to the knee-high floodwaters that ruin businesses every monsoon and turn alleys into canals of floating garbage.
“Look, Ambani made his money and it’s his right to spend it on his own children,” Ahmed said, echoing a common refrain. Mumbai, after all, was a city that understood hard work and celebrated success. “But it’s no surprise that the government is making everything easy for him,” Ahmed continued. “If the government did as much for us as it did for him, it could be really great.”
The four-month marriage, which ended Monday, began in March with a pre-wedding ceremony attended by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Rihanna. This was followed by a sailing trip across the Mediterranean for 800 guests in May. The festivities culminated in a lavish bash at the Jio World Convention Center in Mumbai, a gleaming 45-acre development developed by Anant Ambani’s father Mukesh, who took partial control of his father Dhirubhai’s company, Reliance Industries, in 1981 and transformed it into an empire worth $250 billion today.
On Saturday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped by to give his blessings. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seen shimmying to bhangra music. Anant Ambani’s groomsmen, including Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, took photos with the $200,000 Audemars Piguet watches they received as gifts from their hosts. And a viral video captured a scantily clad Kim Kardashian hanging out with Mamata Banerjee, the matronly deyenne of West Bengal politics.
The influx of guests was so great that the Indian Air Force ordered 24/7 operations during the pre-wedding in March, building new roads, taxiways and immigration counters at the dual-purpose airport. Over the weekend, Mumbai police closed roads near the wedding venue, and travelers complained on social media that flights out of Mumbai International Airport were being delayed by a flood of private jet traffic.
In a tribute to their public service, the Ambanis have in recent months thrown lavish parties for 51,000 ordinary residents of Gujarat. In a Mumbai suburb, they organized a mass wedding for 50 impoverished couples, who were presented with gold jewelry. Reliance, the family-owned conglomerate with assets in oil, telecommunications, media and retail, has presented the lavish affair as a celebration of India’s success. “The presence of respected individuals underscores India’s economic, political, intellectual and scientific prowess,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.
But for many in Mumbai and beyond, the contrasting images — of international VIPs honoring Ambani and of the strain on public infrastructure — pointed to a deeper truth about India today. It wasn’t just LBS Road in Mumbai that flooded in recent weeks. Monsoon rains have paralyzed New Delhi, broken 12 bridges in the state of Bihar and even ripped the roof off an airport terminal in the country’s capital, prompting angry commentary on debate shows and opinion pages.
Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the rapid rise of Ambani and the rest of India’s 200 billionaires, who together are worth nearly $1 trillion, according to Forbes, could throw India’s development off balance at a time when other economic metrics are lagging.
Until recently, China invested nearly a quarter of its GDP in infrastructure at its peak, but India hovers around 2 percent, Ghosh said. Meanwhile, Brazil and South Africa, two other developing countries with extreme wealth disparities, invest 17 percent and 15 percent of their GDP on social services, respectively, compared with 9 percent for India, according to the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
While Modi has been widely praised for placing greater emphasis on infrastructure and social spending than previous governments, he will have to make up for years of underinvestment.
A bigger problem here, Ghosh argued, was the misplaced priorities of India’s ruling class.
“The fact that you can hire Rihanna or Justin Bieber should be a sign of India’s strength, but it’s not,” she said. “Why worry about rain-soaked roads when you can fly in a helicopter?”
But near the wedding venue, many residents were not jealous of the clan often called India’s “first family.” Sweaty welders said they sold contractors 50 tons of steel just to build the event’s canopies and made good money doing it. Outside the gleaming Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center in Dhirubhai Ambani Square, the streets smelled of citrus blossoms. A group of young students sat under a tree, soaking up the celebrity sightings and the $38 they earned the night before as caterers.
Dev Kanojiya, a stylish 20-year-old student, said he had an interview to get the job after proving he was taller than 5 feet 4 inches, could talk with aplomb and had a basic knowledge of Western liquor. He caught glimpses of the Kardashian sisters and professional wrestler John Cena, but he was especially pleased, he said, to see the vast event hall decorated in the theme of Varanasi, his hometown, and that foreign guests would be exposed to Hindustani classical music and traditional Hindu wedding rituals.
Ambani “didn’t just do all that spending for his son. He presented India to the world in a different way, by showcasing Indian culture,” Kanojiya said excitedly. “We grew up thinking that India is a very poor country and we can’t afford these things. But today you see how this is done and who is coming.”
Back across the river, Ahmed, the mechanic, and his neighbor Shareef Khan, a locksmith, were surveying a stretch of LBS Road where shallow puddles had formed again as the rain began to fall. At that moment, a bus hit a pothole with such force that heads on the street corner turned, thinking there had been an accident.
“I know why the roads are bad here,” Khan said. “Politics.”