I attended a Hindu wedding. The bride and groom were friends of my uncle’s doctor, so basically, we crashed the wedding. My uncle told me that it’s okay to crash Hindu weddings, he said everybody does it. When we got there, I think I was the subject of almost as many pictures as was being taken at the wedding party. I didn’t know that Hindu weddings last for two days! I had to stay with my uncle overnight, which was a far cry from sleeping at one of the luxury hotels Chennai has, but my uncle insisted.

In the two days of the wedding ceremony, craziness, lots of craziness goes around. It was so much fun. There are chants and blessings performed before the ceremony, I assuming the chanting was a blessing. Then after the blessings, we got to have breakfast, they had a really fantastic spread of food, they wedding couple really went all out. I sat at this very long table and this huge leaf was placed before me and these servers come down the row with buckets of food and scoop some onto my leaf. I ate with my fingers, luckily, I washed my hands first. Some of the food got pretty messy with just using my fingers.

After breakfast, there were some more blessings, or maybe rituals, one of them involved a swing where the soon to be’s swung on it to symbolize the ups and downs of life. I liked that. Then there were lots of flowers, mostly Jasmine being thrown around. The bride and the groom wore this rope made of jasmine flowers around their necks, and more and more were being piled on after every ritual or ceremony.

Then it was time for the actual marriage ceremony, there were plenty of priests, water, fire and earth elements being represented. Then they, the bride and the groom literally tied a knot. Now I know where that saying comes from. After all of that, the husband and wife have a procession line where I could go up to them and wish them a long life together. Then after all of that, we got to eat lunch! This was no ordinary lunch, I was served about 17 courses and it was all prepared by a well known chef here in Chennai. After lunch, which was superb, the wedding was over. I was so stuffed, that I had to crash another night over at my uncles.