The Big Fat Indian Wedding

Is it time to slim it down to more manageable proportions?

We are all familiar with the Big Fat Indian Wedding. We’ve attended gazillions of them in the course of our lifetimes. We have gorged on the multi-cuisine buffets. We have danced to the tunes played by a ‘celebrity DJ’. We have goggled at the bride’s jewellery. We have gawked at the over-the-top decorations. Hell, some of us have probably even played a starring role in one of these extravagant odes to wealth and conspicuous consumption.

But we may not be able to do any of this for much longer if Congress MP, Ranjeet Ranjan (wife of the controversial Bihar politician, Pappu Yadav) has anything to do with it. Ranjan has introduced a private member’s bill in the Lok Sabha – Marriages (Compulsory Registration and Prevention of Wasteful Expenditure) Bill -- that seeks to limit the number of guests invited to weddings and the menu served to them. The Bill also proposes that anybody who is spending more than Rs 5 lakh on a wedding should declare this in advance to the government and contribute a tenth of that amount to a fund set up to help poorer family host weddings.

Asked about the rationale behind introducing this Bill, Ranjan explained, “These days, weddings are more about showing off your wealth and, as a result, poor families are under tremendous pressure to spend more. This needs to be checked as it is not good for society at large.”

Well, she has a point there. The competitive spending on weddings has bankrupted many a middle class family and pushed poorer ones into debt. And yes, people do spend more than they can afford on weddings in an effort to keep up with (and to impress) their friends, neighbours and extended families.

But is a Bill – which will, most likely, never get passed, even if comes up for discussion in the next session of Parliament – really an answer? Can you really have a legal solution to what is essentially a societal problem? Does the government really have a right to legislate on how and where we spend our hard-earned, tax-paid money? And do adults really need a nanny-state to decide how they should celebrate their weddings?

As far as I am concerned, the answer to all of above questions is a resounding no.

That said, I think we all have to admit that the Big Fat Indian Wedding is getting out of control. Yes, it is a multi-billion rupee industry which creates many jobs and is a major driver of the economy, especially the luxury sector. But sometimes this growth comes at the expense of ordinary hard working folk, who drain the savings of a lifetime to celebrate one day. And that makes no sense at all.

So, how do we encourage people to spend less on extravagant weddings, without trying to corral them in by some intrusive law or the other? Well, I guess we could start with Hindi films, which have done the most to popularize large, expensive weddings in their song-and-dance Bollywood extravaganzas. If we could have a little less of the opulence of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! and a few more homespun Monsoon Weddings, perhaps young couples would learn to value intimate, home-style celebrations over gaudy displays of wealth.

Or we could take our cues from two communities who know how to keep their wedding madness under control. The first are the Parsis, who go to the same wedding caterer to order basically the same set meal, so nobody feels obliged to do any more. (And their guests, who know down to a rupee how much the meal costs, give an envelope containing the same amount to the bride and groom, so nobody is out of pocket.) And the second are the Sikhs, who organize their weddings in the neighbourhood gurudwara, serve a simple vegetarian meal and the most delicious kada-prasad, and are home and dry before the sun sets.

But while you can keep the expense down with a bit of effort, how do you cut down on guest lists without offending extended families, business contacts, office colleagues and prickly neighbours? It’s tough because everyone expects an invitation no matter how nodding your acquaintance and takes mortal offence when the card doesn’t turn up.

Well, there is one solution, though it’s not exactly cheap. You could go with the two words that strike terror in the heart of the father of the bride: destination wedding. But while this will push up the expense of housing and feeding guests, the upside is that you can keep the guest list to a closed circle of people who actually matter to you (and who don’t mind paying for their tickets to your destination of choice). And if you keep things light and casual – like a beach wedding, for example – your expense on décor will be minimal.

Of course, you could always do one better and simply elope with the love of your life. Tell your parents to throw one joint party for your reception when you return. And ask them to put the money they would have spent on your Big Fat Indian Wedding on a down payment on a Small Slim Indian Apartment that you can live in Happy Ever After.

I am getting married in the morning...

If the wedding season comes, can the Bridezilla be far behind?

Whenever the wedding season rolls around, I am always put in mind of that TV series that was aired a couple of years back in India. Bridezillas, it was called, to reference brides and Godzilla, and it portrayed what monsters some women turned into in the run up to their weddings. The to-be brides featured made insane demands of their families and friends, micro-managed things until they had run everyone mad, and in the process, spent ludicrous amounts of money that they could often ill-afford.

The series rang true with me – and no doubt, for countless other Indian viewers – because we have all been witness to a bride or two (okay, let’s make that an even dozen) going into overdrive, and then into meltdown, as she prepares for her Big Day (yes, it is always spelt with capital letters). 

And now that the season of wedding madness is upon us again, I find myself surrounded by more Bridezillas than I can keep track of. There’s the one who insists on flying down to London to buy a white lace wedding dress from Alexander McQueen – just like Kate Middleton, you know! – even though she will only get to wear it at a pre-wedding cocktail party (the wedding itself stars a Abu-Sandeep red lengha; or was it Tarun Tahiliani? I can’t really keep up!). There’s the one who is planning a bachelorette party (don’t you dare say ‘hen party’; that’s so infra dig) in Ibiza, and flying down all 36 of her close friends for that (Daddy dearest picks up the tab, of course). There’s the one who has changed the entire décor of a chateau in Champagne, so that it fits with the ivory and gold theme of her wedding dinner. And so it goes…

I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to take these young ladies aside, pour them a cold glass of water (or champagne, if that will do the trick), and ask them to calm the hell down. It is a wedding, for God’s sake, not a Karan Johar production!

But maybe that’s just the problem. We have been force-fed so many images of extravagant weddings set in exotic locales in our Bollywood blockbusters that we feel obliged to recreate them in real life as well, no matter what the expense or inconvenience involved. So, everything must be ‘designer’: from the wedding hall, the mandap, the overall décor, the outfits of the bride, groom, and their immediate families. And just like in the movies, everything must be colour-coordinated to within an inch of its life. Why, even the menu must be ‘designed’ by some celebrity chef or the other, to keep in with the overall theme!

Far be it for me to begrudge any happy bride her big day, but I wonder if perhaps she would be happier if she relaxed a tiny bit; if she went with the flow instead of playing the control freak?

Well, if any of these soon-to-be-married ladies want to take the less-stressful route to marriage, here is my two cents worth of advice to them:

• Keep that wedding lengha nice and light. If you need to support it with heavy-duty suspenders, then you don’t need it. (Those bruises will be difficult to explain on your honeymoon anyway, when you are sunning yourself on the beach in an itsy-bitsy bikini.) If you need two attendants to hold it up so that you can walk down to the mandap, then walk away from it now. Be as blingy as you like; but keep the fabric and work lightweight. You should be wearing that outfit; the outfit should not be wearing you down.
• You’ve probably already blown the budget on the wedding. So, at least be sensible about your honeymoon. Do you really need to buy two first class tickets to Los Angeles? Cancel that and use the money to book yourself into the best suite at the best hotel in Udaipur or Jodhpur (or even Agra; it does host the most famous monument to love, after all). People fly into these destinations from all over the world for special occasions. Don’t turn up your nose at them just because they are next door.
• Keep your mom and grandmom’s jewelry just the way it is. Don’t reset it in some hideous new-fangled design. Believe me, you will be glad you left it well alone a few years down the line. And if you are buying new stuff, then choose well. Buy one heavy-duty piece if you must, but be warned that it will live thereafter in your bank locker anyway. So try and invest in pieces that you can wear for parties and dinners rather than weddings; you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck with these.
• Most of all try and remember that it’s not all about the wedding; at the end of the day it is the marriage that counts. And beginning married life plain broke, frazzled, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown is the not the best of starts at all!

Listen to the falling rain...

Yes, there is no sweeter sound than that of the Indian monsoon pouring down

As I sit down to write this, the skies have darkened outside and the rain is pelting down. There is something intrinsically hypnotic about its rhythmic cadence. And despite my best efforts to stay indifferent to its charms, the downpour draws me in.

I find myself staring at the raindrops like one mesmerised, tracking the progress of each fat droplet, watching as it splatters down on my window-sill. I watch fascinated as the areca palm on the balcony gets wiped clean of all its dust and grime, emerging from this cleansing looking greener than ever. And that evocative smell of petrichor – as the rain hits parched ground and releases the scent of the vegetable oils absorbed by it during the heat of summer – brings back memories of monsoons past.

As you can probably tell by now, I love the rain. I love its sounds, its smells, and its sights. And I love the fact that it comes around faithfully every year, bringing us respite from the dusty, dry heat of the Indian summer.

Even if you are a city-dweller who is no great fan of Nature, you cannot deny that there is something ineffably reassuring about the arrival of the monsoon. Its annual visit, at roughly the same time, give or take a week or two, tells us that the world is still spinning around nicely. It signals the end of summer and takes us through to the balmy nights of autumn. And no matter how sparse or bountiful the rain, it lifts our spirits, which have been wilting under the incessant, unrelenting heat of the sub-continent.

It’s no surprise, then, that nobody gets the romance of the rains quite like we do in India. Almost everywhere else in this sunshine-obsessed world, a rainy day is always a matter of some disappointment. Generations of British children have grown up on the nursery ditty, ‘Rain, rain, go away; Come again another day...’ In America, people aspire to retire to the sunshine states of California and Florida. And in the cold climes of Europe where warmth is always at a premium, the arrival of rain is not something that is ever celebrated.

Not so in India. In part, this is because of our peculiar climate conditions. Summers are hot, dry and punishing. And then, just when you think that you simply can’t take even one more day of that scorching heat, the monsoons come with their dark clouds, their thunder and lightning, their sharp showers, and their gift of lower temperatures. How can you not dance with joy at their arrival?

But that’s just part of the story. Far more important is the fact that there seems to be something unique in the Indian psyche that responds with blissful ardour to the sight of those grey, gleaming clouds that come bearing rain.

Our literature bears witness to that love. Probably the most famous Sanskrit poem ever, Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, is about a cloud. A Yaksha who has been exiled importunes a passing cloud to carry a message to his wife on Mount Kailash. He tries to convince the cloud to take on the task by describing the many beautiful sights it will witness on its way.

Ever since, clouds and the rains have been a recurring theme in our history, literature and legend. Emperor Akbar’s court musician, Miyan Tansen is widely credited with performing the Raga Megha Malhar to bring the rains down (he is also supposed to have sung Raga Deepak to make the candles light up spontaneously – but that, as they say, is yet another apocryphal story).

More recently, Hindi cinema has done its bit to shore up the tradition of ‘rain songs’, celebrating the arrival of the monsoons with an obligatory sequence of a curvaceous heroine in a sari getting soaked to the skin. But the most iconic scene ever remains that of Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Shree 420, nestling under one black umbrella in the pouring rain as they look deep into each other’s eyes and sing, ‘Pyar huwa, ikrar huwa hai; pyar se phir kyun darta hai dil’.

The rain gods were evoked to great effect by Dev Anand in Guide, with the S.D Burman number, ‘Allah megh de, paani de’ becoming something of a classic. And that same tortured longing for rain and the joy when it finally arrives was portrayed decades later in Aamir Khan’s Lagaan with the haunting A.R. Rahman score of ‘Ghanan ghanan ghir ghir aaye badraa’.

And now, in the days of social media, my twitter timeline comes alive with tweets extolling the rain as soon as the first drops fall. My friend, the journalist Smita Prakash, has a particularly evocative phrase for it; she calls it ‘Clooney weather’ in honour of her heartthrob George Clooney. Former RAW chief, Vikram Sood, crows about how his ‘gulmohur is singing’ in the rain. Even Pamela Timms, food writer and a Brit – not a people generally not known for their love of wet weather – tweets a link to a Bollywood rain song as the skies pour down.

As for me, I can’t quite explain why (or how) but a rain shower has the power to transform me back into the little girl who would strip down to her chemise and run up to the terrace to get a good old dousing the moment the first drops hit dry ground. Of course, being all grown up now, I desist from such childish antics – but God, how I wish I was six again!

The new celebrity circuit

When the A-list drops into India, where does it go?

By the time you read this, the great starship Oprah will have departed our shores after getting a taste of India (‘it’s life Gayle, but not as we know it’). The Winfrey whirlwind started in Mumbai and then tore through the rest of India with a breathless intensity. Oprah partied with Bollywood, was serenaded by children, went shopping in quirky little stores, stopped by a temple, attended a literary festival, and even managed to squeeze in some paparazzi-bashing (quite literally, as her bodyguards manhandled the media entourage waiting to greet her in Vrindavan).

But while nobody got a real sense of what Oprah Winfrey is all about – except that she is an expert manipulator of her own image – by the end of her visit one thing was clear: India now has a new celebrity circuit in place. Sure, the old delights still feature and Oprah dutifully dropped by to be photographed open-mouthed at the Taj Mahal in Agra, but there is a brand-new itinerary in place for visiting celebs.

First up is Bollywood. It is now a truth universally acknowledged that any A-list visitor to India has to hook up with some Indian film star or the other. Hugh Jackman danced with Shah Rukh Khan at an event when he visited Mumbai. Tom Cruise was shadowed by his MI 4 co-star Anil Kapoor during his recent visit. And Oprah’s first stop in Mumbai was at the Bachchan residence where she renewed her acquaintance with Aishwarya and Abhishek (who have appeared on her show) and met their new-born daughter.

Next up is Parmeshwar Godrej. You clearly don’t rate as a bona fide celebrity unless Parmesh throws a party for you. And her guest list is pretty eclectic taking in everyone from Imran Khan and Jennifer Saunders to Richard Gere and now – yes, that’s right – Oprah Winfrey. The beach shimmers, the champagne flows , the stars shine bright and the conversation sparkles as Mumbai’s A list queues up to have its picture taken with the guest of honour.

And then, there’s Gregory David Roberts of Shantaram fame, who is to Mumbai what Mother Teresa was once to Calcutta. If there is a celebrity in town, then Roberts won’t be far behind, organising a visit to the Mumbai slums that featured so prominently in his book. Madonna and Oprah were only the latest celebrities to have been given the grand tour, but you can be sure that they won’t be the last.

In fact, poverty tourism itself has become quite the rage as visiting celebrities vie with one another to visit the ‘real’ India (you know, the one that featured in Slumdog Millionaire). Cue, trips to deprived neighbourhoods, shanty towns, orphanages, crowded railway stations, even sleepy villages. The entire entourage descends on the chosen spot, wearing horrified expressions, SPF factor 50 sunblock and baseball caps, clutching bottles of mineral water in their sanitized hands and trying very hard not to inhale. Some go back home and write cheques to assuage their guilt, others just wash away the grime under the power showers in their 5-star hotel and move on to the next stop.

Those whose sensibilities are not quite up to all this hard-core stuff, get their ‘slice of Indian life’ stuff from the temples. Ever since the Beatles fetched up at Rishikesh to stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in the 60s to learn a bit of transcendental meditation (and a spot of levitation while they were at it) India has been the favoured destination of spirituality junkies. Pushkar, which has the only Brahma temple in India, is a favourite stop as are some of the more famous shrines in south India like Tirupati.

But the recent success of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat Pray Love and its movie version featuring Julia Roberts has given a fresh fillip to this industry. Now, there is a new influx of celebrities descending on India, keen to find themselves through fasting, meditation and some light chanting. Madonna was seen at the Nathdwara shrine in Rajasthan, Mick Jagger is said to be a regular visitor to temples in and around Jaipur and Udaipur, and Oprah herself put in an appearance at the Ma Dham in Vrindavan to film the widows (without permission, as it turned out, but that – as they say – is another story).

On the scenic front, too, things have changed. Rajasthan is still a great draw, but the celebs are increasingly plumbing for small, off-the-beaten path, family-run properties like Deogarh over the big hotel chains. Goa is now officially passé. Kerala is where it’s at, with the backwaters scoring effortlessly over the beaches. And Dharamsala is the new Rishikesh, with the Dalai Lama proving to be an irresistible draw to all those newly-minted Buddhists in Hollywood with Richard Gere (yes, him again!) leading the way.

Yes, there is a new celebrity circuit in India now. And once Oprah airs that India special on her cable network, I’m guessing that it’s going to get a tad crowded.

The backlash against Botox

It’s already visible in Hollywood; but is it travelling nearer home any time soon?

Have you noticed how the only time celebrities ever own up to using Botox is when they announce that they are giving it up? It’s a bit like how they only admit to `substance abuse’ (i.e. doing copious amounts of cocaine) when they are finally checking into rehab in the full glare of the cameras.

The latest in the long line of Botox deniers is Nicole Kidman. The actress, whose forehead has been completely immobile for well on a decade, has never ever owned up to using Botox, putting her wrinkle-free look down to good genes and clean living. But brave Nicole has now fessed up, declaring that she no longer thinks Botox is a good look for her. She intends to give up the needle, as it were, and let nature take its own course.

Nicole is in good, if ever-so-slightly wrinkly, company. Both Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, who once played best friends in Friends and now reprise the same roles in real life, also claim that though they have used Botox in the past (just the once, I’m sure!) they no longer do so. They simply didn’t like the way it felt and decided to give it up, they say, wiggling their eyebrows desperately to prove the point.

Terri Hatcher (Susan Myers in Desperate Housewives) went one better when she decided to ditch the botulinum. Getting out of the shower one morning, she took close-ups of her make-up free, Botox-less face and shared them with the world by posting them on her Twitter account. I don’t know if there is any connection but these days even Marcia Cross (who plays the control freak Bree in show) seems able to move her forehead just a teeny-tiny bit when she wants to show emotion. It’s just the slightest creasing of skin but still, that’s progress.

But while there seems to something of a backlash against Botox in Hollywood these days, there has always been one notable refusinik. Julia Roberts has never agreed to join the ranks of the frown-free because, as she puts it, she would like her kids to know when she is angry. As Roberts once famously said, she believes that your face should tell a story – and it shouldn’t be about your visit to your cosmetic surgeon.

But with such A-listers as Kidman now openly eschewing the frozen look, could it be that the tide is finally turning. It certainly is beginning to look like it. Both Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right had marvellously mobile faces, liberally sprinkled with laugh lines, crow’s feet and creases on the forehead. And as the stars traipsed down the red carpet at the Oscars recently, there were more wrinkles visible on faces than we have seen in years.

Ironically, just as the Hollywood brigade seems to be giving up on the trend, the Bollywood bunch is embracing it with both syringes. These days all our 30-something actresses have fewer lines on their faces than they did when they started out in their 20s. Some of them can barely raise a brow to express surprise, let one frown to show disapprobation. And then, there are those 50-something actresses whose eyebrows are raised so high that they look perpetually startled (perhaps they can’t believe just how old they have gotten).

Needless to say, every one of them denies using Botox but they take great pleasure in pointing out who else has been having the stuff injected on a monthly basis. During one of the many shock-horror moments on his show, Karan Johar even asked his panel of guests to name someone whose Botox had gone really bad. It is entirely another matter that Anil Kapoor got the wrong end of the stick and went on about how Shilpa Shetty’s lips had changed shape and ruined the continuity of his film. (Karan had to gently point out that this must be put down to collagen not Botox.)

And as is usual, real life mimics the world of celebrity. Never before has the use of Botox been so commonplace. And yet, it is hard to find a 40-something woman who admits to using it. Ask them about their suspiciously smooth foreheads and they will tell you about this marvellous facial they had at that spa in Thailand or refer you to this new eating plan which involves all the best anti-oxidants the planet has to offer and which does wonders for the skin.

Honestly, if their noses grew any longer, they would need the services of the plastic surgeon for something more than a little jab of the needle.

But maybe we should just give these ladies some time. Who knows, after a few years of being unable to express any emotion on their immobilised faces, they may just decide that it’s best to go all natural. And then, just like Nicole, Jennifer, Courtney, Terri and the rest, they may finally admit that they had been shooting up all along.

Until then, I guess, we will have to live with their lies, even if their foreheads give away the truth so effortlessly.