A BIG FAT INDIAN WEDDING

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).