Dear Nita Ben (if I may),

Thank you so much for organising such a splendid pre-wedding event for your son in Jamnagar.

A son’s wedding is perhaps the proudest moment in a mother’s life; every mother is obliged, under the canons of sanatan dharma, to celebrate a son’s wedding as lavishly or as austerely as her husband’s means would permit. What was spent at ‘Jammin’ in Jamnagar’, as The Economic Times termed it, was surely just a drop in Mukesh bhai’s ocean of wealth.

So, never mind all that sniping from the sociologists who disapprove of conspicuous consumption or all those cussed moralists who would deride the Jamnagar extravaganza as a “vulgar display of wealth;” nor, should you, Nita Ben, worry about the old elites of Old Bombay who can carry on sitting at home with their disapproving frowns and 19th century Victorian furniture. Like a true icon, you have created your own etiquette of taste and refinement.

And, thank you, so very much for those two minutes of extremely graceful Bharatnatyam on the third day; how can anyone be critical of someone at your age undertaking such a very, very personal yet very public ode to the new-couple-to-be. These two minutes were the cherry on the cake. In any case, you can tell off all the carping critics that you were rather mindful of Prime Minister........

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