Wedding Season
4 June 2007, early morning
So I have now attended four weddings in five weekends. That there weren’t any conflicts in my schedule is pretty amazing.
Gopi and Abiramy were married in London late last month. It was a fairly big wedding, with around 500 people or so, but there was still some drama in that they didn’t manage to invite everyone their parents wanted to. Tamil weddings are usually big affairs, an excuse to have a family reunion. The wedding took place outside of London, in a University Hall. The food was vegetarian, and there was no drinking that day — well, officially anyway; it’s quite common for people to drink at their cars during Tamil weddings — so in that regards it was a pretty traditional wedding. I quite enjoyed the wedding; it was a nice time to be back in London.
This wedding was followed by one for a family friend of ours. I didn’t actually know either the bride and groom; I was told my cousin was going to be at the wedding, so I thought I’d show up as well. (He was told I was going to be at the wedding, which is why he decided to come.) It was a very Tamil wedding: a small army of people, lots of talking (though they tried to stop this), vegetarian food, it started an hour or so late, there were no booze, and it was long. As traditional Tamil weddings go, I think they did a very good job. The priest was a bit too hard boiled for my liking, but other then that it was quite nice.
Wedding number three was Yang and Rajib’s. They were planning on doing an abridged Bengali ceremony. (The “short” ceremony was still something like 45 minutes to an hour.) The wedding was remarkable in that they kept the guest list down to 50-60 people. That is nothing short of a miracle for brown people. Anything else they accomplished with the wedding really does pale in comparison to that feat, in my humble opinion. The wedding took place at Host, and was a very casual intimate affair. I really liked how they organized it.
Matt and Kathleen were married this past Saturday in Ball’s Falls. It was the only wedding that didn’t involve any brown people. They were married in a small chapel out in the the wine country of Ontario, and there was a reception in a barn to follow. As with Yang and Rajib’s wedding, it was a very casual and intimate wedding. The actual wedding couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes long — that’s how you get married people; God damn Hindus need to turn a wedding into an endurance trial. The reception was really quite amazing. You wouldn’t think a barn would clean up as nicely as it does. I’m not sure the pictures I took do the venue justice, but it was a really cool space. (Also, I hope and pray that someone had to foresight to record Matt’s brother speech, because it was something else.)
And with that I’m done all my wedding going for the summer. I am exhausted, but it’s nice to attend weddings, especially those for your friends.