The saga of invitations

As soon as we receive any invitation card, all of us in our family have the habit of reading it in detail and trying to find the errors in it. Of course, it is just out of curiosity and to get some simple entertainment and nothing serious. We have no intention of hurting or offending anybody. Invitations are of different varieties. They speak a lot about the people who make them.

There are some who want to display their wealth and artistic capabilities in the invitations and hence make them as big as an atlas, with a lot of embellishments on the envelope, along the border and everywhere! Images of Gods are boldly displayed on the front.

Then there are a few, who do want to make very grand invitations but really do not have the right kind of taste or knowledge about paper, language, grammar, mode of writing an invitation, etc and leave everything to the printer. Such invitations are made by the printer, using gaudy paper, colours and designs, with a lot of unwanted icons and designs everywhere. The language and grammar are given a go-by and printer’s devil has a free-run! It is fun to read such invitations, with innocent errors.

There are still a few, who really feel invitations are just meant to inform people about an event and hence they need not waste their money or time on them. It is enough if they convey what they are to convey and such invitations are thus very simple and contain only the key information in the most formal manner.

One more aspect that strikes a person’s attention is the information covered in an invitation.  There are people who make references of aspects, which are really not directly connected with the couple or their parents but displayed to show off their ‘connections’ like the bride or groom is related to ‘so and so’, who is a well-known personality or an influential person or a political figure.

Then there are those who want to display the qualification of the bride, groom, the parents and everybody else covered in the long list of ‘With the Best Compliments of...’ Some people want to make invitations very unique and print small booklets containing information about the marriage ceremonies, the meaning of the slokas and what not! Of course such invitations look unique.  But my problem is what to do with such invitations after the event?

Thus I feel invitations should just be made to serve the purpose of inviting people for an occasion and nothing beyond, so that they can be easily discarded without guilt or heavy feelings. In this age of e-mails, it would be so much better to invite people electronically rather than cutting down trees to make such thoughtful invitations, which may not even get the due respect by the recipients. I, for one, believe the best method to invite people would be to go over personally, as far as possible, if they live in the same city. But BBMP is discouraging me from doing this with their scores of projects all over the city!