Marriages are synonymous to the Indian culture, age old
saying suggests that a father's success is measured by the Yash Chopraishness
of his ward's wedding. The recent wedding
I attended and involved was of my close friend based in Hyderabad.
But seriously, before I say anything that might've construed
as a criticism of the vast and constantly expanding wedding-industrial complex
which currently accounts for 38% of the
India's GDP, let me state for the record that I loved my friend's wedding. He
found a wonderful bride in Nivedita-a smart, beautiful, warm, talented, and
funny women who is absolutely perfect for him. They had the best wedding in the
human history, and I am not saying this solely because I had many sweets and
was introduced to approximately twenty-seven single girls.
So I have no complaints about the wedding. I must say,
however, that the planning of wedding was a tad stressful for his father, as
planning a modern wedding is comparable in scope to constructing a nuclear
power plant, although the wedding is more complex because, to pick just one of
the many examples- a nuclear power plant does not require floral installations.
These used called "flowers" , but that was before florists-excuse me,
I mean the floral installation artists- realised that "floral installations"
is more professional, as measured by how much you can charge for installing
them.
Which brings us to budgeting. Here's his father's advice for
parents who are going to be planning a wedding: At the very beginning, decide
exactly how much money is the absolute
maximum you are willing to spend. Write this number down on a piece of
paper and keep it up with you all the times. That way, when the wedding is
over, you can pull it out, look at the number, and laugh until a streamer of
drool reaches all the way down your feet, which will be bare in as much as you
can no longer afford shoes.
Here's the problem. The Indian films which depend for their existence
on wedding melo-dramas, have for decades been hammering home the three core
principles of the modern Indian wedding
FIRST PRINCIPLE: Your wedding is the most important day in
your life, so you want it to be perfect.
SECOND PRINCIPLE: However, it does not have to cost a lot of
money.
THIRD PRINCIPLE: However, if it doesn't, it will suck.
These principles resonate powerfully with your modern
bride-t-be, because ever since she was a little girl, she has been fantasizing
about her wedding day. This is not true of our modern groom to be. When he was
a little boy, he was-I state this with authority-conducting experiments to see
what happens when you set fire to He-Man action figures.
But the bride has
been dreaming for years about having a fairy-tale wedding, patterned after the
wedding scene in the Suraj R Barjatya's VIVAH. Wherein Cinderella and Prince
charming ride off into the sunset in the horse-drawn carriage, while the cute
little girl wave good-bye. What they don't show you in this film is parents in
bare feet paying the bills for the carriage rental, the horse supplier, the little
girl's costume, the sunset installation professional, etc. Because all of these
things cost money. And if you hold a wedding in Hyderabad, as they did , all of
these things will cost extra money, because you will be paying for unionized floral
installation artists.
True Story: I inquired, at the hotel where marriage is being
held, about the cost of renting a projector and screen the family rented so
they could show pictures of Pradeep and Nivedita as guests arrived. The hotel
said, counting the fee for the two workers-required to set the equipment up, it
would cost a sum, I calculated would be
enough to buy a projector and screen as well as a used car to drive them home
in.
My point is that putting in a modern wedding is an expensive
and complicated undertaking, which is why many people, including Pradeep's
father, these days hire a professional wedding planner, whose function is to
make it even more expensive and complicated. The planner works closely with the
bride, as well as the only other really essential person in the wedding, by
which I of course mean the bride's mother.
At this point the groom is pretty much out of the picture,
If the wedding were a solar system, the bride would be the sun; her mom would
be another, slightly smaller nearby sun; the wedding planner would be the third
sun; the caterer, floral installation professional, photographer, videographer
, ...etc would be the planets orbiting these suns; and the groom would be an
asteroid the size of a tennis ball 73 trillion light years away. Sometimes the
groom gets so far out of the wedding-planning loop that the planner forget to
invite him to the actual wedding and bride, at the last minute, has to marry a
member of the catering staff.( That didn't of course, happened in this marriage).
