The Loud Gorgeous Fun Indian Wedding
(and why divorces are less because of them!)
This was that kind a BIG Indian Wedding. Loud, gorgeous, fun!
I can’t ever get over the vast intimacies of the normal wedding in our families, where everything is hyper and magnified and massive - and still captures the scintillating minutiae of the moment. Within the womb of the dance and the music and whoops is the core of the philosophy of the big fat Indian wedding - you are not just marrying a person but are integrating into a full new community of people.
It’s almost a message that individuals are nothing if not their families - and THAT requires a massive celebration.
Of course we go overboard, of course we sometimes lose the messaging, but what is a wedding if not a chance to hyphenate the relationship, and bold-italic-underline the bond. Whilst an expensive wedding is primarily a statement of status, it’s also a billboard-messaging to the couple - “if THIS is the effort we as parents are putting into your marriage, least you can do is to make it last!”
I sometimes feel we have less divorces because of this very reason. And it’s the more intimate wedding, the court marriage, the simple one-hour celebration, which kind of gives permission to the couple to separate as fast as they conjoin.
It’s a theory. 😬
But beyond the theory here was this gorgeous three day high-decibel celebration, in which we found our crazy in. And rediscovered our favourite cousins, marvelled at the children in the family becoming all gawky or beautiful, and found the elders more bent, more forgiving.
And that’s the true joy of family weddings.
To rediscover the tribe which has made us what we are - people we’ve grown up with, often grown apart from, but the ones who have left their traces deep inside us. Meeting our cousins and aunts and nephews again is like rediscovering the warmth or the chill, the comfort or the trauma, of when we were discovering ourselves and were often defenceless, often rebellious - but always filled with both hope and self-doubt. And how we emerged out of the trauma or the chrysalis either enriched or survived. And how, our escapes which were stashed in the fug of the past, reemerge for reconsideration.
Whilst our atavistic selves have so much of the generations and the ancestries flowing in us, it’s the immediacy of our present relationships which gets us to find our definitions. It comes in self-recognitions or in the realisations of how much we’ve changed - and moved away, more than moved on.
There’s nothing good or bad, it’s just the way we grow in the soil of our new changed worlds.
And thus, for me, every wedding is a journey - inside-out, through stories of what people are doing, of what they have started saying, of what the dynamics of family politics is dictating. Often we figure out with some dismay, how our closest ones are still stuck in old hurts or have discovered new ones to wallow in. Sometimes we discover how new dynamics have emerged, where earlier there was nothing but scorn and disdain. Or how, simply, new friendships have formed where there was nothing.
We are, then, finally, so much of what we want of our lives. The folks who do the wedding, the ones who come to them, are then both the facade required by society around them, and the simple soul who wants nothing more than the happiness of loved ones around them.
In the swirl of our lives, weddings are a hiatus to which we go as guests. But invariably we come back with the wonder of change and the promise of possibilities. The commencement of a new relationship in front of our eyes brings a reexamination of how old ones have fared. As we recognise our frailties and our failures, it is reaffirming that there is someone hopeful and ready to commit to something as difficult as a long married life.
I will drink and dance away to that till three in the morning, oh yes.
I have written on marriages - both the ones in waiting, and the ones which have taken place. Do read the fun pieces, here and here.
And I have got a couple of my poems really going great guns on downloads, in Uncut Poetry.
Of Love (& other bouts of sadness)
Listen in!!