Nerve Endings Firing Away

Any thoughts that I had entertained of a small wedding ceremony or the subsequent reception seem to be fading now. Both Ash and I wanted a small ceremony with immediate family and close friends but parents are thinking otherwise. Perhaps they are justified in their actions to invite almost half the town. To make the matters more complicated, our reception in Bombay (following the one in Bhubaneshwar) will be a joint one since my brother would be getting married earlier that morning. So that adds not only his friends and acquaintances but also the humungous amount of family members from his fiancee’s side to the melee that would be popularly known as our wedding reception.

My parents justification for a large guest list is simple – we had attended one of their weddings so it is naturally expected of us to invite them to ours. You cannot argue with that straight reciprocal thinking except there are half a dozen extra members in their family since that last wedding we attended. And of course, we are not expected to leave them out, are we? Even if I have met them only once in my life and that too, as a mere nodding acquaintance. Given that I have spent a considerable amount of time on this side of the Atlantic, there will be plenty of people at my wedding reception that I have never met and would actually be just passing acquaintance of my parents. But then it really isn’t just my wedding, is it? It is actually a ceremony of the entire family or even the clan, if you so wish.

I have simply given up trying to keep the guest list small. I have been asked to provide the list of my friends whom I like to invite and now I am debating whether I should add the names of any college mates who was remotely acquainted with or just call those whom I was really friendly with and risk endless rounds of teeth gnashing from those that were left out. Heck, I might just invite them all and hope only the ones that care turn up but you never know how much pull a free wedding invite has. Although I am not sure if inviting an ex-girlfriend would be kosher and I certainly don’t want any Bollywood-esque moments; already had plenty of those in my life.

However, there is a silver lining to all of this. Nope, I am not thinking about gifts. Well, frankly I don’t know if it is a silver lining since I won’t be around to notice it. Indian weddings are a perfect occasion (or tool) to expand your social network. It is the original social networking tool that worked much before Facebook or MySpace came around. You are deemed a ‘friend’ just because you were invited to my wedding reception. Feel left out? Just get one of your kids married off and invite the whole frikking town and bam! you are back in the loop. Wedding invites in India are more of a social obligation than that in the West. Not being invited to one can have far more serious repercussions than actually being invited for one. It is like your typical thankless job. My parents certainly do not have the problem of being left out of the loop and the only problem might be that they are involved in far too many loops than they can handle. The wedding will be probably the only occasion where all these loops intersect and I’ll be smack in the middle of it, squirming uncomfortable giving an impression like I care. I’ll be expected of course to show that I care otherwise accusations of being a spoilsport or damaged by the West will fly thick and fast.

One thing I know for sure is that I will not be able to draw up this neat relational diagram of the guests at my wedding. But then we never need a tool to spark off conversations in Indian weddings, right? There is always someone in common we know. A billion plus people yet we are separated by less than six degrees. If we don’t, we can always gossip about the ones we know or better still, plan out the weddings for the ‘next in line’ even though they are clearly years away.