Srinagar, July 7 -- Every society carries its own contradictions.

In California's Silicon Valley, you'll find billionaires who wear sneakers with holes. In Rio's favelas, street vendors build family legacies out of pushcarts. And in Kashmir, people spend millions on wedding feasts while their neighbours live hand to mouth.

The valley, often romanticized for its beauty, lives with a brutal undercurrent: about 35 percent of its people live below the poverty line.

You wouldn't guess this while standing in the middle of a Kashmiri wedding.

Gold bangles clink with every handshake. Food is served in such excess that leftovers could feed an entire village.

For many families, the wedding is a staged performance, a costly declaration of statu...