At last a wedding to which we are all invited. The thousand or so guests at the wedding of steel maker Laxmi Mittal's daughter are only interested observers. But aren't we all? Away from those palaces and chateaux, we join all the guests in tripping over those exquisitely unpronounceable French names. Papa Mittal has taught us some new ones. We're checking out all the places he thought of, all the things he thought of doing there, looking at the price-tags of ideas he did not care to look at. There has hardly been a wedding less about groom and bride than about papa and his bills.
Not all of us got that 20-page invite cased in silver, but we almost have the dates down in our diaries. We didn't get the 48-page invitation for the Hinduja family wedding a couple of years back either. These are not invitations to weddings, they are guides to events. When the Indian rich marry, the world has to know of it. The Mittal invite is A4 size and it came with silver, which makes him one-up on the Hindujas, like he is on those rich lists.
Mittal's 'leaked' wedding card charts the wedding's progress. The nuptial Tour de France begins with dinner for family and friends in Paris on June 18. The following day is sangeet, with a play by Javed Akhtar thrown in to run an hour or so—the fee must have done enough to fire the imagination, considering that it is destined for a pretty short run. There will be more of Bollywood on show. After some time it's best to stop figuring. Just think of a fabulous total and add 25 per cent.
The play is at the Gardens of Cuiliers, designed in 1663, says the new Mittal guide to selected locations in France. On June 20 is the engagement banquet at the Palace of Versailles just outside of Paris. The mehndi ceremony back at a Paris hotel the following day and then the wedding at, say it, the Vaux le Vicomte in Maincy in Ile-de-France. We can all try saying that when no one French can overhear.
Very historic, all. But the Mittal guide fails to show just how the steel monarch follows the French monarch. Louis XIV who built the palace of Versailles in the late 17th century loved to be known for the dazzling entertainment of his banquets and obsession with grand new residences. "In my heart I prefer fame above all else, even life itself," the earlier monarch wrote in his memoirs. Our Mittal did not buy a 100-million dollar house in London just because he needs to sleep in 12 bedrooms. Or settle for Versailles because this had to be somewhere.
Vaux le Vicomte, where the wedding will happen, is a chateau built for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's finance minister. Fouquet held a grand party there soon after at which Louis XIV was among the guests. But rivals and the equivalent of the press began to hound Fouquet about his wealth; he was arrested, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. Well, the associations are not all as romantic as the Mittal guide says.
The selling point of the guide is that Paris remains the global cliche for things romantic. And so Mittal booked six days of rented elegance, six evenings of borrowed romance. Daughter-in-law Megha who married Mittal's son Aditya in Calcutta in 1998 does her bit to make romance one of the principal returns of the investment in the Paris name. Poetry can be a significant value addition to Paris; returns will be that much more. And so she publishes some of her poems in the guide.
"Come to Paris on a summer's day/when everybody is jolly and gay (gay?)/bask in those brasseries in the tantalising sun/wander in gardens one-hundred-and-one." Rhymes, see. The woman has been married six years, that presumably makes her a better wife than rhymester. Which is what matters, this Parisian embarrassment will come and go.
The invitation booklet includes a good deal more than can be good for her. "It's a starry night/over at St Cloud/The Eiffel Tower shimmers on the right/But it's summer solstice/By the stage is a commotion/The actors in jubilation/Will it be Shahrukh, Preity or Hrithik Roshan?" It would not be polite to quote more.
Mittal is not the first Indian businessman to want to inspire poetry; there comes a point when money needs cultural embroidery. The Indian businessman is not shy of the idea of poetry. The businessman Manubhai Madhvani, into whose family the actress Mumtaz married, had a willing Punjabi worker write this about his sugar factory in Uganda:
O, Kakira sugar is ever so sweet
So say one and all whoever we meet
As we merrily walk down the street
Someone can judge this poetry competition. But as a Punjabi businessman heading out to Paris said about Megha's poetry, "Poetry koi khaas nahin hai." Oye.
Paris and poetry are only two items in Mittal's deliberate assembly of superlatives. That list includes the finest French chefs—and when you say that you know guests will eat poetry. Additional Indian cuisine is courtesy Munnabhai Maharaj, the celebrity Calcutta chef who cooked at the wedding of the 1998 poet-to-be.
Also on the menu is the best of Bollywood, be it Shahrukh, Preity or Hrithik. The list goes on, starting at the top and ending there. The stars who will attend and not perform. The wealthiest of guests. Costume design by Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla. With Tarun Tahiliani and Suneet Verma designs thrown in for variety. The most expensive hotels, the costliest cars. For a renter of palaces, these things are as nothing. Papa is not arranging a wedding, he is scripting a corporate fable to inspire awe and envy.
What will endure about the wedding is its talked-aboutness, of just how much of the unnecessary Papa thought necessary. Businessmen are speaking of it as a six-day campaign to out-tycoon the competition by an elaborate advertisement of liquidity. Mittal has a five-billion dollar tag pinned on him by the rich lists, and he is making some of it show.
But it's a show that is against the tone of the times in today's London. There are other millionaires and billionaires about—French, American, Japanese, Russian—but they do not go about making an exhibition of their weddings. The Mittal show makes of him something of a new lala on the block.
The English are not going to love him for it. The tabloid press, and the rest, gave him a roasting over what came to be called the cash-for-favours scandal that he would do well not to forget. Mittal paid the Labour Party £125,000 (peanuts, Labour thinks too small) just ahead of getting the Labour government to push his case to take over a steel plant in Romania. Media produced daily reminders that while Mittal runs his steel business from London, his factories are outside. His steel brings few jobs to Britain, his money in tax havens little by way of taxes to the UK economy.
And by the way, before one forgets, there is a marriage taking place here. Within the gold, diamonds and crystal on the designer outfits, Mittal's daughter Vanisha, 23, is marrying budding 25-year-old banker Amit Bhatia. Vanisha has a degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She now helps Papa; that her academic course did not include studies in steel is another matter. Amit too might end up helping Papa some day. In the end, it is all about Papa—and a grand one at that.
