As children, a friend and I were wasting time by browsing in a stationery shop, testing the grip of the latest Inoxcrom, when I asked her how rich she wanted to be when she grew up. A dirty question. We were in Dubai, where the heat would increase so intensely that the only places to go were the malls, those cauldrons of unfulfilled desires, cool and as ambitious as impossible.

She shrugged and said: rich enough not to think twice about which pen to buy. It was an answer girded with an obvious assumption. That much of our material life consists of negotiating this trade-off—if I get this, I can’t have that; the story of all we have is also an elegy for all the things we’ve burned in the bargain.

There comes a point, however, where this awareness can fade, even cease. You can get this and that. The and-being proliferates like a cancer, the gap between a question and its fulfillment is closed, the distinction between need and desire crumbles to dust.

Somewhere along this stretch lie the recent Anant Ambani-Radhika Merchant wedding celebrations. Two pre-wedding parties, one in Jamnagar, one on a cruise between Italy and France; a wedding with more events than Hum Monkey Hain Koun could even imagine; and guests from all over the world, from ex-Prime Ministers to reality TV stars. The wedding is just over as I write this, but I hear there will be more festivities in the coming weeks: more post-wedding merriment, more roads to block, more newsfeeds to clog.

A silly headline read: “If Mukesh Ambani spends Rs 3 crore every day, his wealth will end in…” A bait-and-switch. I clicked, of course. A quick calculation on the back of an envelope gave 932 years. What does this number mean? To us, or even to them. If the idea of ​​poverty seems unimaginable, how can they possibly make sense of wealth, when we derive our sense of things from contrasts? Groomsmen are given watches worth Rs 2 crore; Anant Ambani wears a Rs 14 crore brooch; diamonds hold Nita Ambani’s bun together; bridal jewellery worth Rs 6,600 crore; women lugging emerald stones around their necks, heads held high, necks still in place, posture slightly stooped.

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Reports suggest that this was a wedding of 5,000 crores of rupees, plus or minus a few hundred crores. At some point, these numbers stop making sense. At some point, Ambani’s wealth becomes abstract, a concept. A material reality has consequences. A conceptual reality has only iterations.

This, after all, is the illusion they wanted to create. To make us believe that they exist beyond the shackles that make our lives, other lives, real. They want us to think that they are in a film they produced, directed and starred in, a film that turns A-list Bollywood stars into supporting foot soldiers, extras in a crowd scene; Kim Kardashian into a Didarganj Yakshi; Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Katy Perry, Rihanna into a Rolodex of names and special appearances. All in a film that has created its own ready-made audience: us.

The Ambanis have single-handedly turned India into their unwilling spectators – a spectacle house if ever there was one. French theorist Guy Deobard writes in his book The Spectacle Association that the spectacle requires a “passive acceptance” which it has in fact already obtained by its way of appearing without response, by its monopoly on appearance.”

We live not only in a material economy, but also in an attention economy, and our refusal to value our attention—where we choose to deploy it, where we choose to withdraw it—results in a situation where our eyes, our imaginations, even our fears are decided for us. The goal of the algorithm is not to predict the most devious homepage, but to reshape the most malleable mind.

Make no mistake. The wedding was cinema, just not the kind we recognize. And we have all been recruited, without knowing it, as an audience for the greatest circus trick: a vanishing moral compass.

What has been unfolding on our timelines over the past few weeks has been what Deobard theorized as the demotion of “being” to “having” to “seeming” – where “all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from seeming.” In this dislocation, we can find some of our collective, complicated revulsion at Ambani’s desire to create a maelstrom and place himself at the center of it.

Let’s take a look at the aesthetics: the mechanical boat with a peacock statue on the bow for the bridal entrance, which may get a new purpose for the The Life of Pi the music that was then played at the venue; the manipulated ceiling lighting that made the entire conference hall look like a film set; the colored wristbands that all guests were required to wear around their wrists, both in addition to and despite their custom jewelry, the color of the wristband revealing a coded hierarchy of how close you could sit to the Ambanis; the Xs marked in red tape on the pink carpet so people could pose for the paparazzi. Everyone knew their place.

And what about the consumption of these images? We have been sandblasted and fed a trickle – I don’t know how else to describe it. From news magazines to paparazzi accounts to influencers flooding the social media algorithms to even the public roads of the metropolis being cleared for the family affair. Access to public roads blocked, public beaches made private, employees at the Bandra-Kurla complex, where the wedding festivities were held, told to work from home, a military airfield set up for the event. The idea of ​​‘public’ has been ridiculed, with even the police and the air force, who are answerable to the taxpayer, turned into wedding service providers.

The whole affair is especially offensive because it comes at a time when, according to new research from the World Inequality Lab, income inequality in India is actually worse than it was under British colonial rule. The top 1 percent own more than 22 percent of the country’s income and 40 percent of its wealth. Mukesh Ambani’s wealth alone is about 3 percent of India’s GDP. At a time when the tax structure should be demanding stricter, fairer distribution of wealth, we are witnessing an accumulation of the private by the public.

That the Ambanis can stage this grotesque display of wealth in a period of intense inequality shows how confident they are that people will believe the spectacle and refuse to see it as anything but a spectacle. That we will never retract the steps from “appearing” to “having” to “being” and be outraged at how this has been possible. That necks will always be the place to display one’s wealth, never one’s anger, one’s disgust.

Disgust is a strange feeling that takes over the body. According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, disgust can arise primarily from a property of things, such as a bad smell or a pus-like consistency, that reminds us of our “abnormality and mortality.” There is a phobia at the root of such disgust, and there is something evolutionary about it—for example, our disgust at the smell of rancid milk keeps us from consuming it.

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But disgust can also arise because we project these qualities onto other people, for example by associating a certain demographic of people with smelling bad. These are the kinds of disgust that we should try to overcome, that we should fight against.

Nussbaum also suggests that what we sometimes feel may not be disgust, but anger. For at the root of anger is the desire to correct, while at the root of disgust is the desire to eliminate or, alternatively, to remove yourself from that space.

I believe that the moment we are experiencing now calls for a rethinking of the idea of ​​disgust. It is not just how our disgust is negated by the fact that most of us express it by using Jio phone packages and data, thereby contributing to the very thing we are against, that makes hypocrisy our guiding light.

“(A) persistent feature of the lurid and the sensational,” writes Professor William Ian Miller, is that “even when the disgusting repel, it rarely does so without also arresting our attention…. We find it difficult not to steal a second glance or, less voluntarily, we find our eyes ‘seeing double’ at the very things that disgust us.”

When you keep gravitating toward what disgusts you, the disgust dulls, distorts it with a sterilized self-disgust. It makes disgust attractive and inevitable. How else can you explain the time you spend on Diet Sabya or the pages of the various stylists and paparazzi accounts drinking the Kool-Aaid? That we express this disgust through irony makes perfect sense, because sincerity cannot possibly express it—sincerity cannot express the rotten joy we get from seeing the whole thing, it does not qualify us to become spectators, it does not explain how we wait for the lookbook of another event to drop, even when we feel exhausted by the accumulation of images, of discourse, of disgust. We cannot escape the spectacle, what Deobard calls “the nonstop discourse of the ruling order on itself.”

Arundhati Roy, in her essay “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” wonders who among us sinners will cast the first stone. Noting that she too lives on corporate publishing royalties, a precarious position, she writes, “If the sledgehammer of moral purity is to be the criterion for throwing stones, then the only people who qualify are… those who live outside the system.” The system is so cleverly broken that even to reject it from within is to further promote it, to sustain it, to give the lungs another breath of fresh air. To criticize it is to find yourself in the strange position of pointing fingers at both the system and yourself, cursed to be both the wrong and the wrong.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes for publications, both print and online