Weddings and Me!

So the dreaded wedding season is upon us. Most of us have already exceeded our last year’s record of attending the maximum number of weddings in a month, while some of us (like myself) are done giving excuses for not attending weddings (because that’s just who we are as a person).

In India, attending a wedding is an annual ritual and there is no family that can claim of not having attended a single wedding in a calendar-year. What to wear, how to go to the marriage hall, are some of the pertinent questions that arise, just before the wedding. 

Sometimes a family is pressed with difficult choices to make when there’s more than one wedding to attend in a single day. That’s when the family plays divide and rule and splits the family members in half so that they can cover both the weddings without upsetting any host.

While some families see weddings as a perfect opportunity to bond and meet old relatives, some miserly families, see it as a chance to escape from cooking and eating scrumptious meals for free (in return for a 100 rupees envelope).

And what about people like me?

Well, for me wedding is just a stupid waste of time meeting people you don’t really want to meet at an awkward traditional gathering that just doesn’t seem to get over.

The endless rituals, the never-ending interval between the morning-ritual and the reception and the awkward posing on the stage just drives me up the wall (I totally don’t know what to do with my hands while posing on the stage for the mandatory photograph-session). In a nutshell, that’s wedding for me.  

Coming from a Maharashtrian family-background it’s quite strange for me not to like weddings. But this can be attributed to the fact that I have been brought up in Goa away from the typical Maharashtrian family and wedding culture.

No wonder why I dreaded my own wedding and trust me it was a nightmare to go through the wedding motions.

My earliest scary memory of attending a wedding in Mumbai must be when I was in the eight standard, when I had already shifted to Mumbai. It was some uncle’s wedding and there was this pretty girl of my age who I took an instant liking to.

She was really cute and I sadly can’t recollect her name right now. She wasn’t anywhere related to me and was just a relative of my maternal-side uncle.

I tried my best to woo her but I was spurned thanks to my maternal-cousin (also of my age) who succeeded in impressing her. Not that he proposed to her or anything, but I could make out she was more interested in him than me.

Heck, they also sat on the Bride and Groom’s chair respectively when the bride and groom had gone to get ready for the reception.  

With such a depressing memory associated with a wedding ceremony at such a young impressionable age can certainly drive a kid far away from future wedding ceremonies.

But jokes aside, I do prefer the livelier Christian weddings for their awesome non-vegetarian menu.
So yeah the next time someone from my clan decides to get married they know what to do, just knock my name off the wedding invite list.