By Abhinav Verma
“I was made to come up with a fake Bollywood-style story of how the married couple met, and also gave a speech as the best man at their sangeet. The bride’s friends told me to glamorise and exaggerate how the couple first met — make it romantic, dramatic.”
The big fat Indian wedding is so much more than two people exchanging vows amid a celebration with family and friends. In the age of addiction to social media, guests are being asked — more like cajoled — to take part in various tricks to ensure that the happy couple gets a story that isn’t quite true.
We can’t say if this is the Virushka or Deep-Veer effect, but regular couples now want their weddings to be the next big thing on the Internet. And they leave no stone unturned in their quest for Insta-fame.
Detailed ‘wedding rules’ (such as using specific hashtags) and forced antics (such as coming up with fake love stories to make the marriage sound like a fairytale) leave the guests baffled and bemused.
And this isn’t only an Indian trend, but a global one, too, as attested by the latest Reddit thread ‘This Crazy Bride’s List Of Demands From Wedding Guests Has The Internet RSVPing ‘Hell No’!’, which went viral. We’ve asked guests in India about their crazy wedding demand stories, and the answers are interesting.
“I was made to come up with a fake Bollywood-style story of how the married couple met, and also gave a speech as the best man at their sangeet. The bride’s friends told me to glamorise and exaggerate how the couple first met — make it romantic, dramatic,” says Varun Aggarwal, 29, a researcher from Chennai.
“There was this wedding I attended that had a slideshow of ‘key moments’ in the couple’s courtship, including random drunken pictures from some parties. Later, one of their friends told me that it was an arranged marriage. When I asked the bridegroom why they had done it, his response was, ‘It’s wedding marketing, everyone does it,’” recalls Karthikeya Ramesh, 28, a digital media professional, about a Mumbai wedding.
If made-up love stories don’t raise an eyebrow, then forced hashtags might. “Brangelina started it, and it has been a trend ever since. Every wedding card I get these days has a hashtag. I’m so annoyed that I don’t follow these rules anymore. I purposely uploaded pictures without the hashtag,” says Shashwat Gupta, 29, a businessman.
There’s more. “It’s just crazy when you’re instructed not to talk to the bride or the groom at the wedding for no reason,” says Parul Rohilla, 27, a management professional.
Article first published on HindustanTimes.
