Book Excerpt: Famous Last Questions By Sanjana Ramachandran

India’s ’90s kids grew up in an offline world and graduated to one that’s hyperconnected and seemingly always on fire. This generation’s psyche is riddled with qualms about identity, politics, capitalism, technology, relationships, selfhood, and what it means to live authentically—and in Famous Last Questions, Sanjana Ramachandran strikes at the heart of their confusion.

From describing life in Big Tech to days spent in Vipassana meditation, this is a book unafraid of contradictions, a heartfelt chronicle of the ‘modern’ Indian woman’s tumultuous journey from needing to achieve everything to searching for wholeness.

Here's an excerpt from Sanjana Ramachandran's Famous Last Questions

‘True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.’ —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. 

It is fashionable to hate this show now, and, indeed, it is some people’s idea of a radical opinion that it is ‘not that  great’, but, to me, this is about as interesting as having strong opinions about the culinary value of Maggi Noodles. 

The sitcom I’m talking about is F.R.I.E.N.D.S, of course, and much before it became so popular that the cool kids felt the need to distance themselves from it, and even cooler kids in turn decided that F.R.I.E.N.D.S is ‘actually a good show’, what it was is one of India’s first cultural imports from America, which I consumed just as I was turning thirteen or fourteen.  

It was educational, certainly.1 Of particular importance to this essay is an episode from season five, in which Monica and Chandler first reveal their relationship. They’re still pretending to the others that they’re just friends, but, after a delightfully constructed game-theoretic play of admission involving the famous ‘they know’ and ‘we know that they know’ and ‘they know that we know that they know’, Chandler, in mounting frustration, blurts out that he loves Monica. Monica staggers out of the bathroom, where she was hiding, and says, ‘I love  you too.’ 

The next day I turned on Star Plus at the usual 7 p.m., fully expecting them to get married. But that episode was about something else entirely. To my mounting surprise, Monica and Chandler continued to have a long, quotidian relationship thereafter, with several ups and downs and other incidents, before finally getting married two seasons later.  

It was not a given. The marriage following the ‘I love you’ was not a given, and as I mulled over my certainty that it would be, it became obvious why: every Indian film or television serial until then had employed the declaration of love in service of marriage, which was always meant to be the ‘happily-ever-after’. 

I am unable to think of a mainstream Bollywood film from the ’90s and ’00s that subverted the example, and more scholarly writers than me conclude this too. The heterosexual couple is at the heart of Bollywood, which is often equated with Indian cinema as a whole, by Indians and the world at large. The country’s largest film market is its most visible medium, and its defining pictures are directed by the marquee banners of Yash Chopra and Karan Johar, et cetera. 

Their films portray the ‘big fat Indian wedding’ as the culmination of all the trials that separated the lovers, from family and compatibility to appropriately-sized, but not insurmountable, cultural or class differences—but not caste,  if you remember. Although there is more nuance now, the generations that grew up on these films unquestioningly are still emulating its protagonists. Bollywood actors’ real-life choices inspire real-life couples: ever since Anushka Sharma and Alia Bhatt wore pastel shades on their wedding days,  brides started to want ‘a slightly modern take’ on their traditional bright red coloured wedding dresses. 

‘Tomorrow, when you get married, you probably don’t want to be Jodhaa Akbar,’ said designer Tarun Tahiliani in October 2023, referring to the luxuriant 2006 film, a historical romance drama. You don’t feel that need anymore. You want to be a modern Indian bride. There’s nothing wrong  with going over-the-top, but most of these girls just want to look like themselves.’  

Having had the fortune to attend some not totally fat-free Indian weddings, I can confirm that a bride rarely looks like herself at one. Couples spend up to a fifth of their lifetime earnings on their Big Days, some quarterlife of which is allotted precisely towards not looking like oneself. (In some cases,  loans taken to host the dream ‘Instagrammable’ wedding can take more lifetimes to repay.3) The rest of the funding is spent on inviting and feeding a few hundred guests over days of ceremonies; the usual North Indian wedding, for instance,  has a sangeet, for which the couple’s friends and cousins assiduously prepare hashtags and dance choreographies; a wedding proper, in which priests perform shlokas and rituals that might contradict the modernity so earnestly being constructed elsewhere, such as at the reception or ‘cocktail’ evening, where, once again, the ‘arranged love marriage’  concept dresses up the caste-based glue that has brought the couple together.

There are more than ten million such ‘big days’ per year, making India home to a quarter of the world’s weddings, in an economy worth $210 billion, as of 2023. More importantly, the product has come full circle culturally. It is now an export, a commodity in Western markets, popularized  by diaspora Netflix content such as Wedding Season (2022) and the notorious Indian Matchmaking, so that foreigners are actually willing to pay for the experience. ‘You haven’t been to India until you’ve been to an Indian wedding,’ reads JoinMyWedding.com, which promises ‘the  ultimate cultural immersion’ for travellers looking beyond the usual attractions. For just $250 per person, you can attend an Indian wedding for two days and ‘learn first-hand what it really means to be Indian’, from ‘people who know better than anyone—the locals’. 

Weddings have always been sacred to these locals, marking not only the arrival of the individual but the coming together of two families and cultures. But market forces have introduced elements of the profane, making the Indian wedding the globally recognized dick-swinging contest it is today. ‘The big  Bollywood wedding, its conspicuous consumption dictated by the need to package and present oneself as a globalized Indian who flamboyantly embraces ‘tradition’ as a matter of choice, is symptomatic of a neoliberal subject governed by a regime of consumption where, in order to show that one has ‘arrived’,  every event, including something as conformist as a wedding,  must be presented as uniquely individual,’ writes researcher Jyotsna Kapur.  She traces the ‘arranged love marriage’ to the film Hum Aapke Hain Koun, in which Salman Khan is asked what kind of marriage he wants, arranged or ‘love’. His hybrid answer provided the perfectly Indian script for millions,  who understood that individuality needn’t be sacrificed for collective needs—because it isn’t a sacrifice if what you want is what everyone wants too.  

And all everyone wants is ‘a suitable boy’ or ‘a good girl’ for you.  

This is someone of equal social standing: the same caste and class, with similar educational qualifications, from a ‘good family background’, not broken or in disrepute; the boy should be taller, the girl should be fair; nowadays both of them can work after marriage. Couples meet through their parents, or portals like Shaadi.com, JeevanSaathi.com, or BharatMatrimony.com, where selection happens through traditional filters, but marriage happens only after a period of dating, hopefully even love.

Extracted with permission from Sanjana Ramachandran's Famous Last Questions; published by Aleph Book Company.