BOMBAY, India.- The lavish boda The wedding of the son of Asia’s richest man continues this Saturday in India, with a star-studded guest list including Hollywood celebrities, global business leaders and politicians.
Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son Anant and his fiancée Radhika Merchant, both 29, are getting married this weekend in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, after months of lavish celebrations leading up to the event.
Saturday’s program includes a blessing ceremony in which rich and famous from around the world were expected to greet and pay their respects to the couple at the venue, a 16,000-seat convention centre owned by the Ambani family conglomerate.
A formal ceremony and party took place the night before, attended by celebrities including Kim Kardashian, actor John Cena and former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.
American Kim Kardashian, famous for broadcasting her life on reality shows, shared videos on Instagram in which she is seen with her sister Khloe getting ready for the party on Friday night with ostentatious traditional Indian dresses and jewelry.
The hosts also shared images showing hundreds of people dancing enthusiastically at the wedding venue and dressed in traditional Indian outfits.
Among the hundreds of celebrities from the worlds of sport, business and entertainment who attended the celebrations were FIFA President Gianni Infantino, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Samsung CEO Jay Y. Lee.
“Fantastic wedding!” wrote Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong on social media, alongside a photo of the couple inside the venue. “Best wishes to the new couple and double happiness!” he added.
The party’s pomp received a lot of praise from the media in India, although not everyone on the street sees it the same way.
“They must have spent more than $60 million, while I am struggling to earn $400 this month,” Jitesh Ingle, a shop employee in Bombay, told AFP.
“But this is the life we have. What can we do? Watch their celebrations on YouTube.”
Months of celebrations
The weekend’s festivities will culminate on Sunday with a reception that will cap months of extravagant pre-wedding celebrations.
Events began in March with a three-day gala party for 1,500 guests in the state of Gujarat.
Guests included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, along with personalities from India’s sports and entertainment worlds.
During the gala, American singer Rihanna gave a concert, her first since last year’s Super Bowl.
The second leg, in June, consisted of a cruise for 1,200 guests in the Mediterranean, where singer Katy Perry performed at a masked ball in a French castle in Cannes.
The Backstreet Boys, American rapper Pitbull, DJ David Guetta and tenor Andrea Bocelli also provided entertainment at the evening.
$123 billion fortune –
Mukesh Ambani, 67, heads Reliance Industries, the company with the largest market capitalization in India, the world’s fifth-largest economy.
The tycoon, born in 1957 and raised in Bombay, has a fortune valued at 123 billion dollars, and is the eleventh richest person in the world, according to the Forbes list.
It is not the first wedding organised by Ambani, who is denounced by critics as the “maharaja of modern times” and who inherited a prosperous oil, gas and petrochemical industry.
In 2018, she organised the most expensive wedding ever held in India for her daughter, at an alleged cost of 100 million dollars and featuring the American singer Beyoncé.
The family’s lucrative interests include partnerships with Armani and other luxury brands, more than 40% of India’s mobile phone market and a cricket team.
His family home, the Antilia building, is a 27-storey building that is one of Mumbai’s most prominent landmarks. It cost more than $1 billion to build and has a permanent staff of 600 servants.
Anant’s fiancée Radhika Merchant is the daughter of well-known pharmaceutical magnates.
FUENTE: AFP