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.

Old School Wealth

Shania Twain knows how to be rich. I'm thinking these days that the older gen celebrities (the un-problematic ones) really were the ones who knew how to be rich, really. None of these “I am so relatable” shit. For them, it seemed to be: buy a mansion off the grid, dress in fabulously rich clothes, get a flying pony and just be inaccessible. Come catch me in my gold-plated mansion eating gold flakes for breakfast, you know. Honestly though: why be relatable when one is so rich? I wouldn’t be.

Shania Twain, though. The woman has property fit for royalty in Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva. A mansion like a castle and property big enough to ride horses all day basically. I think right now, Shania is doing a Vegas residency. She’s doing the whole pop star thing. But once the residency is over, she will return to Geneva, take off her shoes and just live off the Vegas money. That, I believe, is the way to live, man!

If I envy a rich person, I would envy her. She’s very old school glam. She’s considered one of the most humble, down-to-earth people among the Larger Than Life celebrities. I don’t think anyone would consider her “relatable” insofar as "one-of-us", though. And there is no call for it. Shania stands on a pedestal. That’s the way to be a superstar IMHO. Her “relatability” is more like royal family relatability, as in not even close to, but we both have kidneys and we also both hate Mondays and we both fell in love once, kind of a deal.

There are two things that Shania has said in her autobiography From This Moment On that has stood out for me. I’d read it way back in 2012 so the details are a little hazy for me now but I remember how she measured her poverty growing up with needing to wash her socks by hand. In India, we’d call that middle-class. She also mused about how poverty in her day forced her to eat vegetables and she grew up healthy, whereas today cheap food would be processed food and so poverty would lead to obesity. I’ve always been intrigued by this. That was good food for thought, pun intended.

They say there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. I remember JK Rowling falling off the pedestal of billionaires because she donated so much money to charity and that’s nice. There’s Taylor Swift who’s become a billionaire recently from her songs alone and I hear a lot of donation and bonus-to-staff stories so that’s sweet too; she’s still a billionaire though. The reasoning behind the absolutist statement is that there is never a cause justifiable for any one person ever to own that big a share of the global wealth.

When you talk about absolute wealth in 2024, it is hard not to bring up the Ambani wedding. I have difficulty stringing up 2 lakh rupees and I hear their wedding invitation is worth Rs 3 lakh apiece. Nita Ambani wore an emerald necklace the size of soapbars for the pre-wedding jam that should be about 4% of Mizoram budget. I mean… damn. Apparently there’s also a 9-page dress code. Guess I wouldn’t be attending it in my jeans and sneakers. 

We look at wealth differently and spend our money differently. But I think all in all, ethics or no ethics, gaudy or classy, whatever it is, Shania Twain’s version of wealth is the way to go. Live it up! Then go back to Lake Geneva and ride a horse, watch the sunset from a sofa by a fire on your lawn, and sing a few country songs.

Oh and be pretty. I get inordinately angry at rich people who are ugly. With all the services available. Not to mention medical advances. Perhaps a topic for another day.