OK HERES AN ASIAN WEDDING...SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT TO A STRICT MUSLIM WEDDING..:jaw:
SOME TERMS MAY BE UNFAMILIAR..ENJOY
The Fights
No Pakistani wedding is complete without a fight or 2. Be it the guest list or the color of napkins - there is always something to have a good ol fashioned battle royal over. Although normally inconsequential, these fights can sometimes boil over, with people (often close relatives) refusing to attend the wedding and canvassing others to do the same. The reason? No one (boycotee's included) are really sure though it most probably has it's roots in the fact that the day of the wedding (planned 6 months ago) has fallen on the same day as a senior aunties' dentist appointment. Said auntie was well within her right to ask brides parents to change the day of the wedding, the parents refused outright, resulting in some 'izzat' related problems for the auntie and other members of her clique.
The Wedding Card
Always a joy to read. Spelling mistakes, 77 names crammed into a wedding card the size of a postage stamp. An example: Mr and Mrs Ahmed rekwest the pleasure of your company at the Walima
Seremoneee of their beloved shon, MuhammadGrandosn of the late Tariq Ahmed and Maryam Hussain. Newphew of Hasan Khan, Cousin of Tanveer Yusuf, Ex-husband of Fatimah Raja,Friend of Ameena Sarwar.
The Guest list
Ahh...the guest list. Your social circle tops well over a thousand, unfortunately, the royal Albert hall was booked out on June 17th so you had to make do with the local town hall instead - capacity..250. For a reason unknown to anyone bar god himself, desi parents are compelled to invite all sorts of barely related weirdo's to the wedding. Remember that questionably OVERFRIENDLY 'uncle' you met at your cousins' BBQ? - Yup, he's invited. Your close friend of 15 years,Ahmed? No space for him unfortunately. Guest list are hard - their construction requires a lot of time, effort and patience. They also require common sense, something which, in a wedding household is strictly at a premium. So stupid, idiotic and downright barmy decisions will be made.
The Rituals
The rituals...deep breaths. All great cultures have weird and wonderful wedding customs. The Jew’s hold the groom up on a chair and dance round him - Sweet. They proceed by breaking a glass - small scale vandalism, but again, sweet nonetheless. Pakistani wedding customs on the other hand range from theft and fore feeding to eerily disturbing levels of emotional blackmail.
Theft:
The theft of course, comes in the form Grand Theft Khussa. For those unfamiliar with indo-pak culture, the wedding celebrations cullminate in a somewhat bizarre ritual where sisters/cousins from the brides side steal (yes, that’s right - steal) the grooms shoes. Like a swarm of shalwar kameez clad locust, they swoop in...Literally wrestling the shoes of the poor sods' feet. He is left there, bewildered - in a state of shock. He has essentially been mugged by a group of sissy girls in front of his family and
friends. If the loss of dignity wasn’t bad enough, the groom is now obliged to pay obscene amounts of money for the safe return of his shoes...so begins the bargaining. What would you pay for the return
uncomfortable shoes that reveal your short stature? £10...£15 at the most. Yet for some reason, the idiot groom ends up forking over £300 to get his shoes back. It is the ghetto equivalent of being
mugged for your Nokia 3210 and being forced to buy it back from the mugger at over 10 times the market rate. Does nobody else find this disturbing? I swear, come my wedding day - I would rather walk out of the banqueting hall bare foot, than pay for the shoes I never wanted to wear in the first place'. Or better yet, maybe I’ll fight back. Let’s see how brave the girls are when I decide to throw a few punches. One black eye = saving of £300. Well worthit if you ask me.
Force-feeding:
At some point in midst of wedding fever, the sodding groom will be force-fed ladoo (an Indian sweet, spherical in shape...mucus orange in colour. See Picture.) by a group of about 33 barely related 'aunties' . Each auntie will turn up with about half a ladoo, ceremoniously forcing it down the grooms throat. In a period lasting no more than half an hour, the groom would have eaten the equivalent of about 10 boxes of Ambala - adding an extra 7 kg to his weight in the process.
The Number of Events
Pakistani weddings have enough events to confuse most attendees into believing that they have been invited to the wedding of a grand Venetian prince, not Mr. Khan’s 20yr old son. The mendhi, the pre-mendhi, the pre pre-mendhi, the registration, the shadhi, the nikkah, the valima, musical nights, laptop evening's, egg and spoon race...arrgh. By the time the wedding festivities are over, the happy couple would have had 3 kids - with twins on the way.
The Cameraman
Perhaps the single most annoying person on the face of the earth. The semi-professional cameraman scours the wedding hall, 1987 Camera in Hand with an absurdly bright light attached. He will invariably catch you when you are stuffing your face with Kebabs, or when you have a few grains of rice stuck to your chin. His light is almost blinding, comparable perhaps, to a near death experience...yet he still
keeps it on - full blast, with an astonishing disregard for the pawns in his sordid Bollywood debut.
The Clothes.
The bride comes in wearing a red bed sheet embedded with sequins and the groom is dressed like Aladdin. I am yet to see a Pakistani wedding where something other than that is the case.
The Segregation
Oh boy. Segregated weddings just do not work. The intention is fantastic, seperate the men from the women, minimise free-mixing, promote islamic culture. Great. Unfortunatley, this holy intention isnt shared by all. The organisers seem to think that a mere silk curtain will prevent wife seeking loners from the mens side from venturing into enemy teritory. The sanctity of the curtain will last for about half an hour, after which, the first breach will occur - usually a close male relative/uncle. Before long, the curtain will fall – much like the berlin wall, with folk flocking to either side...rejoicing in their liberating victory over the tyrant organisers. A bit of advice, segregation will only work with an electric fence.
Perhaps a few dogs patrolling the buffer zone.
