By Sharanya Gopinathan
I wanted to be so enthusiastic about the Virushka wedding! It was everything I had ever dreamed of being excited about: an individually/separately talented, shockingly good-looking and successful celebrity couple, a big glitzy wedding, a hush-hush guest list and a shaadi dream-team creating the perfect wedding aesthetic.
So why was I just not that into it?
Maybe it’s because of all the deja vu. None of the news we have yet is giving us anything we haven’t seen before.
I feel like I’d already exhausted my reserves of happy discovery when Kimye did the original secret Italian wedding. Even the bits of elegant Tuscan-yellow stone we can see in the background of the few Virushka pictures we have just trigger memories of millions of Instagram pictures from all one hundred Kardashians at Kim and Kanye’s Italian wedding.
Thanks to Sabyasachi’s constant tweeting, we found out that the bride and groom were wearing all Sabyasachi on all days to all functions, from Anushka’s jewellery to Virat’s signature khadi kurta. This naturally meant that they looked exactly like a page from any Sabyasachi collection catalogue ever published, with Anushka even opting for the brand’s signature “micro-dot bindi”. It’s the most familiar wedding aesthetic in the world, and it honestly felt too perfect to look at for long.
The lone video we have of the wedding ceremony itself, posted by Kohli, looks like it was lifted straight off the sets of Yeh Jawaani Hain Deewani (except for the glaring lack of Deepika Padukone anywhere), and I honestly thought for a second I could hear Kabira playing in the background (it was actually Jasleen Royal’s Din Shagna Da Chadeya). The visual was just so absurdly familiar, like the YJHD wedding and Virushka’s own Manyavar ad had a baby. Even the news that they were selling their wedding photos for charity did nothing for me— didn’t Angelina Jolie do that with the pictures of her twins?
Or maybe it’s because their wedding just didn’t really turn into the kind of media spectacle we need, or even demand from celebrity weddings today. Sure, there’s a media circus on for sure, but in controlling the narrative around their wedding, and giving us only a few first-hand glimpses into it, Virushka cannily starved the media of the usual juicy details it loves to make a spectacle of.
So for lack of other pictures, gossip and videos, other than what Virushka chooses to put out, we have boring explainers from India Today decoding who Maharaj Anant Baba is (Sharma’s family priest), accompanied by actual Google Earth snapshots of his headquarters, Anant Dham in Haridwar.
NDTV wanted you to know that the wedding reception card was as “dreamy” as the wedding, and basically wrote out most of the text from the pictured card in their report. News18 dedicated an entire report to understanding the song we heard playing in the background in the video of Sharma making her “bride entry”. This evening, most news channels were reduced to showing which cricketer, Bollywood actors and celebrities had congratulated the couple and how, with India Today even delving into negative space, pointing out that Ranveer Singh had ostensibly not wished the couple despite being generally very active on Twitter. They also airing some tweets from fans, in particular one wondering why the couple had been dubbed Virushka and not Kohma.
You can almost see how desperately the media’s scrambling for a story here, and it’s almost sad how far they have to stretch the little they know of the story. I mean, where are the endless accounts of what Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor, Mira Rajput and Alia Bhatt wore, the scandal of Deepika-Ranveer not being invited and the imminent box-office/Koffee With Karan showdown we’re consequently bound to see? Where are the reports of spurned ex-lover item girls attempting suicide outside the wedding venue? And how can we wonder gravely if Salman Khan was invited if we already know that nobody from Bollywood was?
So, I don’t know what exactly it is about the Virushka wedding that stops me from getting into it. Have I seen it all on Instagram before, or am I just seeing too little of the good stuff on the news?
I think it’s because I’m the only one who appreciated Anushka Sharma’s lip-job. I thought it brought some interest to a perfectly-proportioned but frankly boring face. Maybe it’s the lack of a noticeable lip-job I’m feeling in the Virushka wedding right now. The photos are too perfect, the light too dreamy, the outfits too beautifully Sabyasachi. It all looks like a beautiful picture I’ve seen in a book before, and maybe I have, in a fashion magazine about a celebrity wedding somewhere. And this time, the media couldn’t even jump in and spoil it all.
Co-published with Firstpost.