The mega-shadi
JUST as shadi season rolls around every year, so too must a column giving voice to all the silent suffering of people who have to attend the grotesquely lavish and unashamedly gaudy events that have come to pass as wedding celebrations in this country. While it is the very rich that are holding the most lavish celebrations, it should come as no surprise to anyone that, at every class level, Pakistanis are overspending, overdoing, over-competing, and over-choreographing what used to be celebrations of two people being joined in matrimony. Evidence of this is in the numbers — Pakistanis reportedly spend Rs200 billion annually on weddings.
At the centre of this is what should be called the ‘mega-shadi’ — five or six insanely lavish events held to celebrate the nuptials of someone who usually is either in politics, or has feudal or industrialist connections. Often, they are also people whose actual sources of income remain anathema to common arithmetic. People don’t get wealthy enough to hold mega-shadis by hard work and ambition alone, at least not in Pakistan.
The model for the mega-shadi is the Ambani wedding, the most ‘mega’ of mega-shadis in recent memory. Since that event was held, numerous trends from that over-produced Bollywood-esque tamasha have made their way into the Pakistani mega-shadi. Central among these is the presentation of every member of the bride and groom’s family as a character from a movie. And as it goes with Bollywood movies, there must be dances. What used to be dancing as fun and games has now become an enterprise. Choreographers must be hired; the mothers of the brides now do their own numbers. Marriageable cousins vie for visible positions in the line-up, everyone is judged brutally; the too fat, the too thin, and the awkward are relegated to the back rows. The boys must perform too; a new Pakistani masculinity requires being able to dance at weddings to everything from Bollywood songs to American rap numbers.
In essence the mega-shadis are the nightclubs of the day. The mating dances are familiar, the assessments are calculated, and investments have to be made for there to be a payoff. Just attending these events (let alone holding them) can cost millions if all the outfits for the family, the salon appointments, and the transportation, etc, are taken into consideration.
The bride and groom themselves must also have survival strategies; often for the ‘bridal entry’ and the ‘groom entry’, where the imaginations of enterprising wedding planners devise new tortures every season. This season alone, I have seen a bride arriving in a rowboat through a small and fetid-looking waterway into the event hall, to waiting crowds of guests. In a groom entry, the entire groom’s party of over 20 young men entered the party holding Kalashnikovs, which they were throwing up in the air while dancing.
The Pakistani wedding used to be a rich cultural event full of heritage.
A word about going viral: every mega-shadi’s highest aspiration is just that. When taste is gone notoriety must suffice. Influencers are now invited to mega-shadis just so there is a possibility of this happening. In at least one shadi I heard of this year, separate pre-event events were held so that social media around the event could be professionally produced. Think fake rituals, fake laughter, fake hugs all choreographed for the reels and TikToks that are essential to a mega-shadi. Influencers and professional social media managers play an essential role in making sure the content gets traction.
The Pakistani wedding used to be a rich cultural event full of heritage and ritual. This is no longer the case. In a culture where appearances always mat-tered, the mega-
shadi reflects the worst that is in us — the desire for approval and acclaim gone morbid and garish. No one likes to consider that the poor are suffering while these productions of consumption and emotional hollowness are being held. But in a society where the gap between the rich and poor is routinely taken for granted, this kind of ‘celebration’ is a particularly vile iteration of callousness and moral death.
The mega-shadi is here to stay because its very popularity is an example of its cultural acceptance. The only way to stand up against it is to opt out, have the home wedding with only close relatives, make an active refusal to have private moments plastered all over social media, and an intentional refusal to capitulate morally to what it represents. In a society dependent entirely on appearances, now obsessed with social media, who has the strength to just say no.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2025