The great Indian wedding

We had received a little more than a dozen wedding invitations this summer from family, friends, and the neighbourhood. It felt good to be included by a diverse set of people hailing from different regions and communities. We noticed that all of them were heavy, large, and dazzling. All the cards had a gilded look with contrasting colours. The ubiquitous Ganesha was embedded creatively in most of them. All the cards were printed on one side, in beautiful fonts. Each of them when opened had separate cards for each event of the wedding. The invitation cards were then laid out for a better view.

Just then, the doorbell rang. A friend and her young son had come along. She had some important work to attend to in the vicinity and asked me if I could 'babysit' her eight-year-old for a couple of hours. The boy was taken in. He was excited to see the cards that took up most of the floor space. He promptly picked them up one by one and soon they were all mixed up. Since I was in charge of him for the evening, I improvised a game for him based on the cards for a treat.

He was made to sort them out in terms of dates, venue, names and events. Then he had to list out the similarities in the weddings. He spent a few minutes on them all over again and told me that all of them had a Haldi ceremony, a Mehandi, Sangeeth, and reception before the nuptials. Since he had attended a few weddings recently, he told me about how he always had only chaat and ice cream wherever he went. He had made 'marriage friends' of the children of fellow invitees. He apparently enjoyed bursting balloons used for the decor and also counting the number of people ahead of him in the queue to wish the couple. He also mentioned that he had learned the 'Tum Tum' dance steps well and joined the couple whenever they boogied on stage.

I looked at this veteran at weddings and asked him if he enjoyed them and his answer fascinated me. He liked to hold the heavy fairy gowns of the brides and tug at the Sherwanis of the grooms. He was familiar with the wedding songs, food, smells, and photo points among other things. He liked them but he was bored with their predictable nature.

When the boy left, I started returning the cards to their respective covers ruminating on his observation of the great Indian wedding scene. How and when did we manage to bring in uniformity into a vibrant, varied, and distinctive institution of marriage in our country where each family had carved out its own ethos and traditions?