Priyanka Chopra

With a net worth of $80 million, Priyanka Chopra, the brand, is impressive! I didn’t know quite how rich she was, so I had to Google it. Which I did because I like how she is doing being rich.

She is so obviously delighting in her wealth. It’s fun checking out her IG page. She’s always at some fancy pants event or location, posing for pictures and looking gorgeous. 

What I like best about it is that she doesn’t seem to take things for granted. She’s always showing off her family, her brand, her work, her vacations, her life. When you’ve been rich for a long time and you’re as well-travelled as she is, I imagine it would be easy to be disenchanted. But she doesn’t appear to be such. She always seems to be marveling at the things she is seeing, the clothes and jewelry and makeup she is wearing, the people she is meeting, the events she is attending, the experiences she is having. Even the things she seems to do all the time. Like celebrity parties.

I get that she is an actor and she is promoting a Lifestyle. I don’t necessarily consider myself a fan of hers and I'm not sure I agree with a lot of her choices. But it is really cool to look at her wow-ing over all these hobnobbing rather than appear disillusioned. I am a born cynic but perhaps because I am such, I like seeing people obviously enjoy things.

Come to that, it is a pet peeve of mine to see people appear jaundiced over other people having fun and/or experiencing new things. I notice this sometimes. Even with things as common place as, say, flying. Sure some people might have grown up flying here and there but some others fly for the first time as adults. And sometimes I watch these people look all judgy at these first-timers like royalty judging peasants or something. Like people being excited and/or nervous over things was indicative of them being uncultured or less refined than they are. It’s true of restaurant experiences too sometimes. Or pool parties. Or fancy booze. All of us are ‘fancier than’ but also ‘less than’ compared with others.

With PC, a lot of these shit must be old hat for her, especially modelling events, because she’s been doing this since she was 17. But she never looks bored. She always looks like she’s appreciative of where she is.

I like this about her. There are a lot of celebrities who know how to be rich, in my opinion. Enya comes to mind – living in a castle with cats. Shania Twain is another – do the glam tour and then retire to Geneva and ride horses and walk around barefoot and shit. Just more lowkey than PC. PC appears not to be a homely type of person so her sharing the things her money is buying her and still getting excited over them is nice to see. You don’t need to rub it in people’s faces that you’re rich and pretty, but I don’t get that vibe from her IG, just a lot of excitement.

I wish for more people to relish the things they get to do.

UGLY

I judge ugly rich people. Very much. I feel like if you are rich, the least you should do is be good looking. Or at least make yourself look good. A little bit more than presentable. In this day and age, HOW can you be so stupid to still be ugly?! Like fine don’t give to charity and what not but wealth and looks are things everyone tries to get. And if you have wealth, looks is easy to get. So get it.

Even in Mizoram, no one wants to be ugly anymore. People are into rhinoplasty, lasik, permanent beauty tattoos, micro-bladings, micro-shadings, fillers, botox, transplants, maybe not tanning but more like fairness treatments, and so much makeup. It’s dazzling. And enchanting. The end result is aesthetically pleasing. As it should be. Cavemen were ugly. By 2024, there should be a lot more beauty around. 

Or at least have a USP. Even if you do not aim to be or want to be conventionally attractive, get a team to style you. Look eclectic maybe. I mean I am OK with Mark Zuckerberg because his whole thing is NERD. Or maybe Android Nerd, IDK. Maybe. Point is, he owns the look. So I let him off the hook. He looks like a creepy android but we’ll give him a pass. 

Mukesh Ambani, for another, is from an older generation. Maybe it's too late for him to be looking good. Ah but you have to hand it to Mukesh that he looks scary. Like he would fuck you up if you cross him vibes. That’s a definite USP. Also the man has so much money what does it matter? I mean this man has a Snow Room in Antilia, just in case Mumbai’s temperature soars and he has no time to retreat to the Swiss Alps or wherever. Or conversely, for when he has no time to go out in the sun to get Vitamin-D, the building simply provides it for him via the walls. Special materials, or something. Private rooftop helipad? Three in Antilia, thank yew. I mean, he can afford to be ugly.

Beauty is also very much in the eyes of the beholder. I love how Dolly Parton always laughs off any criticisms to her dedication to looking like the town trollop. Quite aside from the quick-witted, hilarious replies she flirtily delivers whenever people question her on her whorish look, like how she drawls: it takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap, honey, I think this is also a calculated move. In a celebrity-worshipping culture as inherent as in the US, this OTT look would always ensure she can go incognito whenever she likes. She just has to not be Dolly. The ultimate Superman/Clark Kent IRL. She created herself an Image. In which she has built an escape for when she needs it. Smart. Like she says: I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.

So no. I’m not talking about a specific ideal of beauty. Just don’t be ugly. We expect it of people. Standards, basically. No matter how hard some people may push for it, total egalitarianism is never something that is remotely desirable. We are different. It is what pushes civilizations forwards. Difference. Symbiosis. Each doing their parts. The limbs, the hearts, the brains, the kidneys, you get the idea. Like how we expect pastors and elders to have better functioning homes and better behaved children; it’s just in the job description. If you’re going to be telling other people to be better, demonstrate. We know you’re only human. But if you’re going to give, be prepared to get as well.

And so rich people need to be better at it. Stop being ugly. Do more. Be more. Live more. We will all judge each other constantly on how we look. Stop expecting people to be equally nice and deferent to everyone. It just does not work. Better yet, stop judging people when they do not defer to you when you show up at their places looking like a mildly bankrupt farmer just home from IDK pig rearing. Show people a little respect and look your part. That way, everything is easier on all of us. You’re rich, you can afford shoes that do not pinch. Because of course no one will treat the Queen of England the same way they treat a random chai-wallah. It is just what it is. 

Also in these the days of the Gram, a lot of us live vicariously through you. Be better. Step up.

Images

There is a framed photo that is always displayed prominently in my house. It features my parents on their wedding day. But it’s been doctored, so much so that they have been lifted off of the church premises and superimposed on a faded pink rose that is itself somehow superimposed atop a random lake. So to sum up, it is a picture of a couple standing on a rose in the middle of a lake. Perhaps not very realistic and even romantically, not the most idealistic of aesthetics.

There is a story behind this picture. At one point in our family history, we lived in West Kidwai Nagar in New Delhi in one of the government residence quarters. Sarojini Nagar was only a few minutes walking distance from the house. So we were often there. We always ended up with cheap clothes and cheap everything that is characteristic of visiting one too many flea markets but that is another story for another day.

Sarojini Nagar market also had a shop called Paul’s Photo Studio. In the days when we still had to take pictures on specialized machines called cameras and then produce the reel to developers like cavemen, we often visited Paul’s. One day, my father was talking to the man behind the counter. The man was enthusiastically telling him about the wonders of Photoshop and how he could touch up old pictures, colour the B&W ones, remove age spots off of prints and whatever else. This was how we ended up with a lot of our old pictures retaken by Paul’s. My father often looked for good photos filled with memories to “re-snap”. We have a bunch of those, like a nice coloured picture of my grandmother, and two very random ones of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham – three framed photos, by the way, that are also always displayed in our home.

One of the Whatever Elses that Paul’s boasted of was the ability to recreate photos in such a way as to make them magical. And fantastical. And all levels of wonderful artistic mastery. He convinced my father that if he could get his hands on his wedding picture, he would have a very satisfied client in his hands. My father, for all his cynicism, is also an eternal optimist and always been naively superstitious and believing. So that is how we ended up with my parents on their wedding day, standing on top of a random pink rose on top of a random lake. Aside from the ridiculousness of the concept art, it’s not even good Photoshop.

Dad sent my sister and I to go pick it up one day. We laughed so hard it offended him. Them, actually – Paul’s photo genius artist and my father, both. But what was done was done. Not only was the photo printed, but it had also been framed with the option of it hanging off of a wall or standing on a flat surface. We refuse to bury such a treasure. Hence the prominent display.

It often makes me smile. In these, the days of easy recording and editing on smartphones, we have not visited a studio – Paul’s or otherwise – in a long time. And today, in this carefully curated world of IG aesthetics, your impossibly long legs and noses that have disappeared from being too heavily filtered, not to mention Kardashian beauty standards that have come home to our pages superimposed on our faces, this photo is a testament to remind me that not everything I see in a photo is real.

And that not all edits are desirable.