‘Tis The Wedding Season!

‘Tis the season of weddings in India, again.
Indians have it good, actually. Being the multi-ethnic, multi-linguist, multi-cultural, multi-faceted country that it is, India has this awe-inducing annual calendar that somehow factors in seasons, earning and spending capacity, the average Indian’s desires, all the Gods we worship (and there are a LOT of them!) and their many eccentricities, and I suspect, the hormonal make-up of the lady of the house as well.
How else do you explain that wedding season falls exactly when monsoon arrives to give this summer-dried land of ours a reason to feel happy again? My colleague, Maya, captures the sentiment perfectly of what it means for a parched, tired land to receive rain. It’s considered auspicious to have it rain on your wedding day, so Indians on the brink of ‘settling down’, as we call it, rush to wedding halls in the month of June either to celebrate their own wedding, partake in sumptuous feasts of others’ or gift clocks by the dozen to newly wedded couples as if to say, ha!, time’s running out for you.
Just kidding.
But seriously, here’s the flow – file returns in the first three months of the year, declare investments in April, splurge on gold in May, thanks to Akshaya Tritiya, get married in June, wallow in self-pity for having over-indulged in July/Aug, intake more sugar than is required to celebrate our elephant God in Aug/September, burn up money in Oct/November during Diwali, mope in November for another 6 months gone, and boom – wedding season redux in December. Here’s proof, if you don’t believe me.
Smart, aren’t we?
So how many of you are getting married this June? And how did you propose to your would-be significant other?
For those who are looking for inspiration to pop the question, here’s Woodrow going down on his knees in front of his girlfriend, Claudine, in an elaborately orchestrated proposal in Madison Square in New York. This video has gone viral on the Web and is being touted as the proposal to beat.