Wedding Reception in India
A Satire.
Decades back when I watched the movie Godfather-1 something looked familiar. Movie began with wedding celebrations in the home of Don Corleone. Similarity was not in the wedding celebrations or the dance. It was the tribute part. People came, took the hand of Don Corleone, and kissed his ring.
Wedding reception in India is very similar. People come and offer tribute in cash and kind. It makes me wonder if Hollywood was inspired by marriages in India. Remember those Hollywood movies where mafia gangsters hold a meeting and one remains absent and he turns out to be behind killing all those present?
No. No. No murder happens in marriages in India, generally speaking. People do get killed in firing 'accidents'. But that is rare, and limited to the bad lands of Wasseypur
What is similar, is the gathering of gangsters. Each group attends the wedding as one unit. Tributes are meant for the couple. The group leader collects them anyway.
The Collection
A shiny or not so shiny envelope contains crisp notes in Rs 500 denominations, the largest currency note available in India. A one rupee coin is stuck on the envelope by default, to make the total sum auspicious. Prime numbers, it turns out, are auspicious in India.
This is where shifting loyalties get noticed. Tribute usually flows to the gang leader who invited that guest. Guests who skip this and pay the couple directly are making a statement. The old gang can suck it.
In this particular wedding reception the result was shocking. Less than 10% of tributes went to the couple. Some guests even paid both sides. Loyalty, it turns out, prefers to hedge.
One tribute was canceled hurriedly. An iPhone 17 pro max worth 2 lacs was to be offered as tribute to the 'witch' but she misbehaved with guest and the rest is a story.
Let me start the story from the beginning. It starts outside the venue, with a signboard announcing the display of authority. It was written in this format:
Jailer weds Prisoner
Kabir Bedi called marriage a life imprisonment two decades back. Then he went on to marry twice more. He just made sure to divorce first. Even in prison, apparently, sequence matters.
"Elon Musk married three times. The same woman got him twice. Divorced twice, or rejected twice, depending on who tells the story. Either way, someone paid twice for the same mistake.
Never mind the facts. Married couple are strangest of all mafia couples. Killing each other is rather frequent, but the way they survive with each other is even more revealing.
When bargaining power turns unequal, a marriage starts to look like a jail. One partner sets the rules. The other complies, no appeals, no parole.
Hindi movie "Do Aankhen Barah Haath" gave us the fictional open prison. We are watching a real version now. This prisoner loves his jailer so completely, he has no time left for relatives. He calls it love. It reads like a life sentence, served happily.
On top of it he throws a party called wedding reception.
Wedding Reception
First of all, there is no such thing as a wedding reception. That is a coined term. There is a wedding, then a dinner. After the wedding, the bride moves to the groom's home, and his family throws a party in her reception. Hence, the name.
The sign outside the wedding venue, therefore reads Girl weds Groom, since her family hosts. At the reception, it reads Groom weds Girl, since his family hosts.
Here, the marriage took place months ago. The reception is now. Yet the signboard still reads Girl weds Groom. Who is giving reception to whom?
Who paid for this party? Both families did. So the board should have read Marriage Reception for Mr. and Mrs. followed by the groom's surname. But it appears that nobody bothered with details.
Event Management
The bride's brother is an event manager by profession. He picked the leanest day of the year. Rainy season with no wedding traffic. He picked Ekadashi, a day of no meat and no alcohol. Then he served both. Half right, it turns out, is still half wrong.
Only a few guests actually observe Ekadashi. But an event manager notes such things anyway. There was no special food for them. I asked. They served papaya and two types of melon. Melon grows on the ground, and in rainy season, worms get inside easily. Not the safest choice. A good don never wastes a bullet. This one did not waste a melon either.
He had done this before. At an earlier lunch, he booked a non-vegetarian restaurant, then served vegetarian food since I do not eat meat. That single meal was bad enough to spawn an entire article series on "fats in food."
The vegetarian food here was stale too, recycled from earlier events, as banquet halls often do, freezing and re-serving endlessly. Changing tables hoping a better dish did not work. Under influence of a good tip, a server told me that only cauliflower was freshly cooked.
It turned out that cauliflower was mashed and tasted worse than anything frozen. Even the don would have shown more respect to a fresh vegetable.
Before leaving, the event manager was told that non-vegetarian food was excellent. He was pleased. He did not remember me as vegetarian. He did not care then. He does not care now.
The party was great. Nobody threw up. Thanks for so little to eat.
An oldie handed me a glass of champagne like he was parting with gold. We were four people. One glass. We all knew champagne at weddings is Indian or Russian, poured ceremoniously, is cheap one. I handed to the next. He did to his next person. Then the next when it had to be stopped. Otherwise, it would have reached back to the oldie stuck in socialist India.
An interesting party to watch.
The bride looked like she raided Umrao Jaan's wardrobe. The groom looked ready to model for Raymond. Together, they looked like emissaries from two different royal courts seated at the same dais.
To my surprise, my bouquet of flowers was the only 'non-tribute' gifted that night. Turns out my bouquet was most offensive to all tribute collectors.
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