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The paparazzi incurs losses when they cover celebrity weddings and other functions outside Mumbai, said photographer Varinder Chawla. Citing the example of the recent pre-wedding festivities of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in the town of Jamnagar in Gujarat, he said that his team found it incredibly difficult to find accommodation and transport, but couldn’t ignore covering the event because of its high-profile nature.
In an interview with the YouTube channel Hindi Rush, he said that while there is money to be made in the paparazzi business, numbers have been massively inflated online. He did, however, admit that he and his team don’t make money when they cover events outside Mumbai. “It wasn’t like we were invited to Jamnagar recently. We cover it because we know the entire film industry is going to be there. I went myself, but we couldn’t find a single hotel room; the entire town was booked out. Somehow, we managed to get one room and three of us squeezed in together.”
He said that they took turns to stake out the local airport, because they knew that’s where they’d get the best content. “Local drivers were charging three or four times the normal rate to transport us around the town. At the airport, they gave us badges and had created a special area for the media. But it’s not like they invited us inside the venue to cover the wedding. I tried to see if I could get in, but it was like a fortress,” he said with a laugh.
He also recalled the challenge actor Aamir Khan had once thrown to the paparazzi community to get pictures from his wedding to Kiran Rao. “It was somewhere around Lonavla, and I remember going out there with some other photographers. We were there for four days, and we wanted to live up to the challenge. But he really had made incredible arrangements to safeguard his privacy. They’d increased the height of the resort’s walls. I tried to convince a waiter to click photos from the wedding, and I remember giving him a cheap Kodak camera. I promised I’d give him Rs 5,000, but it couldn’t happen,” he recalled.
The Ambanis have hosted a couple of pre-release events ahead of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s wedding in July. The latest celebration was held on a cruise ship in Europe.
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