Celebrities at an Indian wedding
Oho, normally I have to run after my boss all the time and ask “OK do you have some work for me? I am idling right now” and normally he can come up with something. But this afternoon, he couldn’t come up with anything after I finished a lot of work simultaneously yesterday and today.
So, I can finally talk about my first Indian marriage! It was the marriage of a colleague of a friend of mine, Albane. Indian marriages go on for several days and I visited only on the second day, the day when they are already officially married. And it was big. It all looked like a small fair. A large buffet and a Ganesha idol (“The remover of obstacles”, you pray to him traditionally on weddings), a stage etc. on the fairground.
But actually, I didn’t experience too much of the wedding, the traditions and so on so I can’t tell you too much about it: We were constantly surrounded by locals who wanted to shake our hands, make photos with us, ask the same questions like “Which country you belong?”, “Your good name?” over and over again or just stare at us in one metre distance. This was really exhausting but funny for a time. I haven’t experienced this admire-phenomena so extreme, yet. Not even in slums where Westerners are (even) more rarely seen. Now I know how celebrities feel. Over all, I think we really stole the groom and the bride the show.
But we were really innocent, we just had to stop somewhere and talk to each other (or answer the singleton questions of the locals) for less than one minute or so to see how glaring locals stacked up around us in one meter distance.1
One guy who could speak a little bit more English than just to ask the standard questions constantly wanted to drag and pull me to dance with him, another small child nudged me the whole time to get some attention.
And there was this old guy who seemed to kinda pity us in our situation but still wanted to shake hands with us. So he came to us several times during the wedding while the walls of people built up around us, shook our hands, asked “Any problems? Any problems?” – “No no, everything is alright.” – “OK OK”, shook our hands again and wouldn’t go away till we shook his hands again and said something like “OK thanks, bye”.
But it was definitely worse for Albane. (And I guess it would have been worse if most of the locals wouldn’t have thought that we were a married couple.) During the ceremony with the groom, the camera with it’s flood light lasted longer on her than on the groom: As soon as the groom finished to do something interesting, the cameraman would immediately turn back to her just sitting there. It all looked really ridiculous to me.
But definitely an experience I won’t forget.
1 It is a very little known fact that the favorite sport of Indians is not Cricket but Glaring
