Indian Wedding Shuts Down Fifth Ave, Opens Up Debate
By J. J. Ghosh | 07 May, 2026

The ostentatious celebration is drawing scorn from the motherland, but for New Yorkers it was just another day of traffic.

If you were trying to caricature what New York City might one day look like with its first Indian mayor, you might come up with something like “They’ll be shutting down Fifth Avenue for Bollywood-style wedding parades.”

Which is exactly what happened this past weekend.

Dancing, dhol drums, and hundreds of vibrantly dressed guests took over one of the world’s most iconic streets for the wedding of Dr. Avish Jain, an endocrinologist and medical journalist, and Pankti Doshi, a genetic counselor and event creator.

OK, fine, maybe they obtained the NYPD-issued event permit months before Mayor Mamdani even took office.

And, in fact, it might surprise you to learn who actually took issue with this grand spectacle.

What’s a Baraat?

For the uninitiated: a baraat is a traditional South Asian wedding procession, typically led by the groom, en route to the venue where the bride and her family are waiting.

In the Hindi-speaking regions of India, it’s an unrestrained street celebration — DJs, dhol players, lights, family, friends, and dancing in quantities that would make a reasonable person question whether anything productive will happen the next morning.

The groom traditionally arrives on a white horse.  The guests dance.  Aunties cry.  Uncles embarrass themselves.  It is, in the most literal sense, a party in the street.

Americans got their first real introduction to the scale of what an Indian wedding can look like in 2024, courtesy of the Ambani family.  The wedding of Anant Ambani — son of Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia — and Radhika Merchant was a six-day event in Mumbai estimated to have cost between $600 million and $1 billion.

The guest list included Adele, David Beckham, John Cena, the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, Tony Blair, and Boris Johnson.  Mumbai traffic was rerouted for days.  The New York Times described it as introducing the world to India’s Gilded Age.  For most Americans, it was their first glimpse of just how far the Indian wedding industrial complex can go when the budget is essentially unlimited.

The Jain-Doshi baraat was not the Ambani wedding.  Not even close.  But it updated the format in its own way: instead of a white horse, the groom arrived on a parade float.  Instead of a DJ, he sang live Bollywood numbers from an open vehicle.  The bride sang with him.  The five-day wedding celebration spanned five venues, six DJs, eight caterers, ten choreographers, sixteen fashion and jewelry designers, 400 guests, and 8,000 flowers.  The baraat was Act 4.

The couple secured their parade permit with the NYPD six months in advance.  Daily permit fees for street events in New York can range from $3,100 to over $66,000, depending on size.  This was not a spontaneous cultural eruption.  It was a meticulously planned, fully licensed cultural eruption.

This was also not the first Indian wedding procession to go viral in New York.  About a year ago, Indian American CEO Varun Navani’s 400-person baraat took over Wall Street and broke the internet.  Fifth Avenue is simply the sequel.  At this rate, the steps of the New York Public Library are next.

So Who’s Complaining?

Here’s the twist: it wasn’t New Yorkers who took the most issue with the baraat.  It was Indians in India.

The reaction back home has split along a familiar fault line in the global Indian diaspora.  One camp sees the baraat as a joyful export of Indian culture — a visible assertion of South Asian identity on one of the most famous streets in the world, a “love letter to New York City” as the couple themselves described it.

The other camp, which has been considerably louder on Indian social media, sees it as NRI showing-off: the kind of ostentatious display that gives Indians abroad a reputation for excess, and that conveniently ignores the fact that shutting down Fifth Avenue for a private party is a privilege that most people in India — and most people in New York, for that matter — could never access.

There’s a version of this that reads as South Asian pride.  There’s another version that reads as a reminder of just how wide the gap is between the Indian Americans who can afford to throw a five-day, five-venue, 8,000-flower wedding in Manhattan and the working-class South Asian immigrants driving cabs and stocking shelves in the same city who cannot.  Both readings are simultaneously available, which is what makes the conversation so heated and so familiar.

It’s worth noting that this is not a new argument, nor is it unique to what happens on American streets.  When the Ambani wedding happened in Mumbai in 2024, Indian politicians and commentators were equally scathing — one former member of Parliament called it the most vulgar display of wealth in recent memory, pointing out that the money spent represented a fraction of a percent of Mukesh Ambani’s net worth while Indian income inequality sat at its highest level since the colonial era.

The debate about ostentatious Indian weddings going too far is one that Indians have been having in India for years.  The Fifth Avenue baraat simply relocated the argument to a more photogenic backdrop.

The New Yorkers stuck in traffic, for their part, seem to have mostly shrugged.  This is New York.  Last week it was a baraat.  The week before it was a film shoot.  The week before that it was a protest, a marathon, and a presidential motorcade, in that order.

Mixed Feelings

I’ll be honest: I’m torn on this one.

Part of me loved seeing it.  There’s something genuinely thrilling about watching a community that spent decades being told to keep its head down and assimilate — to be quiet, to be grateful, to not take up too much space — shut down Fifth Avenue in a turquoise lehenga and sing Bollywood songs at full volume in the middle of Midtown Manhattan.

I also love watching others learn about the traditions that I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in my whole life — even if this particular version involves a $66,000 permit and a parade float.

But I also think about what story we’re telling when this is what goes viral: Not the South Asian nurse working a double shift at a public hospital.  Not the Bangladeshi cab driver who’s been navigating these same Midtown blocks for twenty years.  Not the Indian American public school teacher or the Sri Lankan bodega owner or the Nepali delivery worker who actually lives in this city and keeps it running.

The image that travels, the one that gets a million views, is the one where we shut down the street for a $66,000 parade permit.

I want us to take up space.  I want us to be loud and visible and unapologetically present in the culture.  I just also want the world to know that we are more than the wedding.  The risk of going viral for the baraat is that it becomes the shorthand — that “Indian American” starts to mean “the people who throw the expensive parties” rather than the full, complicated, sprawling community that it actually is.

We aren't just rich.  We aren't just a spectacle.  And I’d hate for the most memorable thing about us to be the traffic jam we caused on the way to Rockefeller Center.

That said, it was a pretty awesome traffic jam.