Posted on 04/20/2007 9:06:49 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
As a manglik, or someone with Mars in the ascendancy, Rai carried the risk of illness and early death for her husband. This fate was diverted from Bachchan when Rai "married" a banana tree last month. Love triangles are one thing, but few involve sick banana trees.
In the celeb fixation that has engulfed the media, we are used to the frenzy about "hot" entertainment industry couples and their weddings, but in Mumbai yesterday, edgy police were hoping the metaphor didn't get real.
About 500 of the Indian financial and film centre's finest were on guard for the Bollywood wedding of the century, between the actors Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan, armed with fire extinguishers in case any of Rai's distraught fans turned to self-immolation at the thought of her giving herself to another.
The event is fascinating at many levels: the sheer romance of the Bachchan film dynasty's scion marrying India's most-celebrated beauty; the detail of the finery employed (the silk saris, the 50 kilograms of henna); the astrological superstition that still envelops even highly educated people like these in their nuptials.
As a manglik, or someone with Mars in the ascendancy, Rai carried the risk of illness and early death for her husband. This fate was diverted from Bachchan when Rai "married" a banana tree last month. Love triangles are one thing, but few involve sick banana trees.
Most interesting is the guest list for the three days of very private ceremonies at the Mumbai mansion of the patriarch Amitabh Bachchan. It illustrates a powerful intersection of three worlds: business, entertainment and politics.
The central figure was not the Big B, but a tubby, moustachioed MP, Amar Singh, who has deftly drawn leading figures from film and business into his web.
Singh is the secretary-general of the Samajwadi Party, which rules the huge northern state of Uttar Pradesh, population 175 million, where political shifts often swing the nation.
The party is based on the large, upwardly thrusting Hindu lower castes, mostly the Yadavs, among them the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, also a wedding guest.
Amar Singh is actually an upper-caste Rajput, but that is no barrier in caste-based politics. Mulayam's chief adversary in the state elections now under way (in several stages, with 100,000 police and paramilitary troops being rotated for security) is a lady called Mayawati, who comes from the Dalit, or former untouchable, non-castes, and she has recruited 50 Brahmins, members of the highest caste, as candidates.
According to the new book In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce, Singh has converted his Lutyens-designed MP's bungalow in New Delhi into a fantasy worthy of a James Bond villain: lashings of white marble, soft-porn statuary, giant plasma TV screens in every room, and a fold-back ceiling that reveals a glass pyramid modelled on the Louvre extension.
The money behind Singh initially came from Subroto Roy, a Bengali who made a fortune from a chit fund (money-lending business) in Lucknow, the Uttar Pradesh capital, then launched his Sahara group into vernacular media and an airline. Roy was also one of the select guests.
Singh and Roy are reported to have come to the help of Bachchan senior a few years back, when he urgently needed finance for some of his film projects. In return he was expected to lend his filmi charisma to Samajwadi, and his wife, Jaya, was duly listed for the party's seats won in Parliament's upper house.
It was Singh's recruitment of Anil Ambani, the racier of the two brothers who inherited the giant petroleum and textile group Reliance, to join the party as an upper house member in 2004 that essentially started the family rift in which Reliance split up within a year. Ambani was also among the wedding guests. So Aishwarya and Abhishek adorn a circle with plenty of bling: Anil Ambani, who pulled out the high-risk/high-gain mobile phone and electric power businesses from Reliance; Subroto Roy, the Hindi-belt media magnate; Amar Singh, mastermind of caste-based politics.
So, to paraphrase the title of the historian A.L. Basham's great panorama of India's past: the wonder that is India. Where it evolves is beyond anyone's guidance. Some say we will all be speaking a patois of English and Hindi before the century is out.
Fascinating...thanks for posting that.
You’re welcome.
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