Do you hear wedding bells?

I love weddings. There, I said it. And with my background and bearings, it sometimes gets challenging to defend my unflinching stance for the love of weddings, but that is something I will fight for till the end of the world. Weddings are beautiful. The colours, the food, the people, the stories and the memories, everything is so exciting, so vivacious. Its the only time in our modern lives that we take a break from the mundane and let life wash over us in all its vitality.

Since I have been a sucker for weddings pretty much all my life, it has automatically led to my having volunteered for wedding related tasks and shenanigans of quite a few people around me. From crazy shopping sprees, to wedding PR, to selecting invitations, to planning vacation looks, to running the randomest of errands, there is hardly anything wedding related that I had not tried my hands at. So naturally, when it came to my own wedding, I was already the badass bridezilla, first of her name.

All of us have a vision of what we want our wedding to be like. But in this country, where weddings are not events but an entire industry, its a maddening experience trying to plan a beautiful, intimate, and unique wedding which will not end up being the creepiest day of your life, haunting you in form of weird wedding/pre wedding videos and morbid photographs for the rest of your life.

If you are a middle class bride (deliberately not including grooms here because they are mostly lazy AF and content to let others do the work that ideally they should be doing on their own, like everything else in their lives), the challenge is very real.

Balancing a work life with wedding planning is death. You work by the day, shop in the evening, sit and plan things late into the night for months on end while eating, drinking and breathing tons of useless advices, articles and breathtaking pictures from various wedding blogs and websites. But when you actually start putting things together, you realise how impossible it is to plan a realistic wedding on a sane middle class budget, and how little help there is for brides who are not willing to sell their own and their parent’s kidneys for their wedding.

That is the thought I had in mind when I thought of writing my experiences out here. To try and talk about the real challenges a modern indian middle class bride faces while trying to plan her dream wedding. In retrospect, I can probably be benign and use the world beautiful to describe my journey towards my wedding. But those who know me know how I was one step short of turning into the Hulk all along, because of the sheer madness the process of my self planned wedding was.

I write in the hope that those of you starting your journey now, will find some useful experiences and advices here, and in some way, I will get to vicariously be a part of your weddings too. So watch out this space for the things you need to know if you are a Bourgeois Bride!