Mad(e) In Heaven

“The wedding was great but the snacks were the real star of the show”

‘Come September’ might have been the music theme for the eponymous romantic comedy, but it has apparently gained fame in the northern reaches of the country as the ‘doosri wali dhun’ played routinely during baraats causing many a baraati to rock until hapless passersby are convinced that the person rocking and thus inadvertently blocking the route to their legitimate business is off his rocker in the first place. It is how we welcome the wedding season.

In this large and lovable country of ours, ‘Come November’ is a better theme because it is the start of the silly season which lasts well into June, when you are dragged nilly-willy into everyone’s itch to hitch. If Lord Vishnu can rouse himself from cosmic slumber on Prabhodini Ekadashi to marry Vrinda in what is celebrated as the Tulsi Vivah, how can puny humans not emulate Him? Taking a cue from the Gods, they rush to pledge themselves to their (not necessarily) better halves. Add a celebration prone people to the mix and you get glitz, glamour, gigatons of gold, good cheer, and gazillions of guests.

Any life-changing event needs witnesses. ‘The bigger the better’ has been a common theme since days of yore, accompanied by several rituals. If this is only too evident in births and deaths, can event as seminal as marriage be left behind? It of course deserves its own chapter in the book of life. And nowhere is this more evident than in the Big Fat Indian Wedding, with its ever-increasing BMI, which has either not heard or does not care about the global obesity and Syndrome X epidemic. The sizes of Indian weddings tend to follow the lines of those of American food portions: large, huge, and enormous. Even the most private of weddings easily boasts a crowd of a hundred and fifty or more. With the great Indian family boasting ties which not just bind but also gag, to not invite your aunt’s sister-in-law’s third cousin four times removed is an unpardonable crime. Playing the ‘better safe than sorry’ card, wedding venues burst at the seams with so many people milling around, that gate-crashers appear far more genuine than legitimate guests, as evidenced in the movie ‘Three Idiots.’

To be a part of this three-ring circus can be fun for the gregarious kinds, but if you happen to be the shrinking wall-flower kind (my favorite), then such weddings represent a Chakravyuh which will put the one designed by Dronacharya in the Mahabharat in the amateur class. Battling your way through this melee dressed in heavy armor (read your finery), accosted at every step by pesky long-lost relatives who pop up with the battle cry “Remember Me?,” adroitly fielding nosy queries about your job, money and family while trying to summon a smile when enlightened about how Chinki, Pappu (not RaGa, he has smartly avoided weddings for fifty years) and Sonu are doing much better than you can be extremely taxing for the uninitiated.

There was a civilized time which I remember from my distant childhood in which weddings were genteel events which you attended with your hand tucked safely in an elder’s, when you were expected to arrive for the Mahurat, shower the newlyweds with rice grains, blessings and a discrete envelope containing cash, partake of the ice-cream thrust at you by the waiter ( don’t even think of hanging around in hope of seconds) and beat a dignified retreat within the space of an hour. If you happened to be a relative or a particularly close friend, you were invited to join the banquet which was a classy sit-down affair with a few standard ‘wedding’ items on the menu. Immediate family like older, married siblings, uncles, aunts, and first cousins, next door neighbors and a few out-of-towners doubled as wedding planners, beauticians, decorators and if need be impromptu caterers and attended the pre-wedding ceremonies which mostly comprised of ritual poojas and havans, attended to by a well-endowed family priest in a dhoti and a large upvastram barely covering his girth as well as the main event. A small pandal to feed the extra mouths and a few strings of lights formed the decorations and distinguished the ‘wedding house’ from the others on the street. So far, so simple.

Now that times have changed, weddings like everything else have been ‘upgraded’ into bigger (though not necessarily better) versions of themselves. Wedding planners have replaced the aunties in charge, multiple cuisines with live counters and chefs tossing roomali rotis in the air have replaced the few homely food items and queues snaking for miles at the buffet and at the reception line have replaced the formal sit-down affairs. The venues are transformed from the street to the starred hotels. The less said about the themed decorations the better. The invitations have morphed from single page comprehensives to multiple page novels detailing everything from when, where, and how the happy couple met to what they expect from YOU on their several pre-wedding and wedding day functions. A clothing theme, an entertainment theme, food theme, song-and-dance theme. All you can do is heave a sigh of relief that you are not expected to tag along to contribute to the cost of the honeymoon theme! Most weddings these days stretch themselves for a minimum of four days with a Haldi ceremony, a Ladies Sangeet (what do the gents do I wonder?), a cocktail night, a reception and so on and so forth. The actual wedding ceremony is often lost in transit, what with flexible and multiple Mahurats!

Just how much of an effort the guests put into attending said weddings was borne home to me when the spouse had to attend a destination wedding in a golden beach state. Now, getting the spouse to dress in new clothes for any occasion is a Herculean task, but to co-ordinate all the clothes required for this three-day bonanza entailed several shopping trips on the part of yours truly looking for a pajama here, sandals there, and a yellow Modi jacket elsewhere for the haldi ceremony.  The list for the must have items for this wedding far surpassed those for his own (to me, unfortunately). Anyway, to cut a long story short, said items were procured, the spouse duly dispatched and I was looking forward to a couple of days of peace. No such luck. The wedding now having taken on the aura of Casper the (un)friendly ghost haunted me in the form of the spouse messaging a hundred times a day asking which pair of trousers went with which shirt, which jacket with which tie, which socks with which shoes and when was the yellow theme till all I could see was yellow spots before my eyes.

I generally try to slide out of the bigger wedding dos for the simple fact that most of them require me to wear a sari, which is not my strong suite. After four or five failed attempts, I finally manage the feat with several safety pins and prayers that both the pleats and the pallu should behave themselves and not cause unnecessary embarrassment by coming undone in a large hall packed with several elderly relatives. High heels, a handbag and a large buffet plate add to my woes as I teeter about trying to make small talk with several people who recognize me but whose faces and names don’t match in my middle-aged memory. While I feel a leap of delight on receiving a wedding invitation, it is laced at the fringes with a nameless dread at all the shenanigans involved.

As I discreetly rub my aching ankles after attending one of these necessary evils, I cannot help but remember the words of wisdom imparted to me by my uncle,  “After all these shindigs, no Indian in their right mind will do it twice. That is the real reason for the low divorce rate in India.” I tend to agree. Whether or not you believe the ‘Ek dooje ke vaaste’ theme of matches being made in heaven ala the movie ‘Dil to Pagal hai’, the themed weddings of the new generation are definitely the stuff of ‘Mad(e) in Heaven’!