Daddy Dearest

Kyunki sasur abhi world8217;s richest Indian hai SRK performed at this do too, along with Rani Mukerji, Aishwarya Rai and Akshay Kumar; international star Kylie Minogue sang; top-rung Indian fashion designers Tarun Tahiliani, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, and Suneet Varma dressed up the couple and their families; Vanisha8217;s sister-in-law Megha8217;s questionable writing skills were summoned for verses on the invitation card 8216;8216;A slow romance, an affair to remember/Wouldn8217;t you like to know how/the groom got pinned under?8217;8217;; and Javed Akhtar8217;s intellect was drafted in to script a play for the audience.

O yes, make no mistake about this8212;they weren8217;t guests out there, they were an audience. If ever there was an assiduously crafted statement that money can buy anything and anyone a play on the couple8217;s romance by Bollywood8217;s premier wordsmith, c8217;mon! then it was this.

And make no mistake about this either8212;the leading man in the story is not, as you are thinking, the budding young investment banker who just got married. When the credits roll out, star billing will go to the sasur, the richest Indian on the globe, and the fifth richest man in Britain of whose wealth we8217;ve all witnessed highly publicised proof this week. So there!

LNM was born in 1950 in Sadulpur in Rajasthan. He was 26 when he was packed off to Indonesia to take care of a family mill there. Steel has always been his business. From the 1980s through to the 21st century, he acquired loss-making steel mills and turned them around in a fashion that would be the alchemist8217;s envy. LNM now oversees an empire that stretches all the way from Canada and the Caribbean to Kazakhstan, Algeria and Eastern Europe.

In the mid-1990s, he moved to London where8212;Dale Carnegie ought to be told8212;he managed to influence some important people despite winning some enemies in the British media. In what has come to be described as the cash-for-favours scam, LNM paid pound;125,000 to Britain8217;s Labour Party, an incident that was coincidentally followed by the Labour government putting in a good word in his favour as he tried to take over a steel mill in Romania.

In a country that would not take kindly to Laloo Prasad Yadav and sundry fodder scandal, this was no small mischief. The English press has been at pains to point out that while LNM may have benefited tremendously from living in Britain, the converse is not true, that his factories are in other countries which means the jobs too go to people elsewhere.

But all this is so decidedly boring when compared with daddy8217;s wedding arrangements for his 23-year-old little girl. Groom Amit Bhatia says LNM8212;8216;8216;papa8217;8217; to him now8212;8216;8216;is a very humble man8217;8217;. He also tells us he8217;s uncomfortable with those inevitable questions about whether he will join papa8217;s business 8216;8216;because it8217;s personal 8230; and because there8217;s been no talk of it between us8217;8217;. He adds: 8216;8216;Right now, my only thing is to stand on my own feet.8217;8217; And papa kehte hai? We8217;ll know soon enough.