Why the big fat Wedding is a big fat bore

Christmas season is also the mating season as PG Wodehouse would have put it. Between November and March the Indian wedding season peaks. I sometimes wonder if cooler climes make for better mating. I am sure they do.

According to Business Standard the period between November 23 and December 15, 2023 will produce 3.5 million weddings with an expenditure Rs 4.25 trillion. Rich Indians throwing plenty of money behind Indian weddings has even prompted the Prime Minister to make a plea to hold the weddings in India so that the money spent stays within the country. After all it is not as if foreign locations have better infrastructure to host a wedding? What resources would after all an abandoned railway station in Italy have?

In the West the wedding is a small intimate affair with close family and friends and has an air of solemnity about it. In fact, the guests at the wedding are people whom the couple knows personally and intimately. In contrast the guests at an Indian wedding are people who the parents of the bride and bridegroom know personally. The couple getting married often might not know 95% of the guests. They will be proudly introduced to the guests momentarily to be forgotten for ever after the wedding. In other words the Indian wedding is a narcistic display of wealth and hospitality for the parents of the couple.

When one of my friends sons was getting married he objected strongly to having hundreds of guests whom he didn’t know at his wedding. He was asked to shut up by his father. He said ‘I am paying for the wedding and I will call whom I want’. So the Indian wedding is more an occasion for the parents rather than the couple. This is because the parents hold the purse strings to the event. And there is another difference between the Indian wedding and the Western wedding. In the West, the couple getting married will fund their own wedding expenses. Please note only the wedding expenses without the Indian largesse of paying for the travel and boarding costs of the guests.

Some people I know just returned from one of those big fat weddings feeling exhausted and bored. You might want to know why. For one they did not know anyone at the wedding. Secondly, they found the whole process of a dress change for every single event very tiring. The bags they had packed for the flight looked like they were going for an international holiday because they had to pack several dress changes, all formal.

After a while they got tired of the food and tired of watching every event. Add to that several people talking in a language they didn’t understand. (the native tongue of the wedding family). But of course no one will really admit that they were thoroughly bored in spite of their travel and rooms at a fancy 5 star hotel being paid for. In advertising we refer to a term called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance happens when you hold two conflicting thoughts in your head. For example you love both hamburgers and cows. So everyone comes from the Indian wedding telling us how much they enjoyed themselves, when they were really just waiting to get off the wedding train.

At the end of the wedding of course a few hundred crores have already been spent. Sure the parents of the couple may be bursting with pride for having hosted an army but the deeper question is whether the couple really enjoyed themselves. As one of my friends said why not give all that money to the couple for them to enjoy the rest of their lives.

But that would never happen. How will the parents glow with narcisstic pride if the money were just given away?

The Indian wedding will continue to be an industry instead of a small intimate affair for solemnising vows.