Wedding Drums and Nagging Aunts
Weddings are such fun affairs until your twenties. It is one of those rare occasions when you make elaborate plans on what to wear with your cousins and siblings, choose your attire, accessories, style your hair and get ready to look amazing. It is nothing short of a local fashion show considering that Indian weddings are such grand affairs. No matter what age group one belongs to, Indians are supposed to dress extravagantly for a wedding. Right from aunties wearing designer sarees and three-four sets of jewellery to older women wearing silk sarees and uncles dressed in fancy golden sherwanis, everyone is dressed in their best clothes for a wedding. As a child, you just have a fun-time eating sweets and ice-creams to your hearts content with no one watching over, playing with other kids till your beautiful dress has lost a few sequins, is soiled while you were walking around the cooking area playing hide and seek.
Only as you grow, you realize that during all this time, you were completely unaware that your parents were busy fending off questions like your scores in different exams, how pale you look and your choice of subjects in college. And suddenly, one fine day, you are an adult, so you have no one to hide behind and you are bombarded with several such questions, most nagging among those is, of course, the question of your marriage. And while you try your best to be diplomatic and explain to them that you are still studying and not in the right frame of mind for marriage, discuss your career aspirations, the relatives still continue to tease you that you are next in line for the wedding. As you age, this becomes such a annoying experience as you run out of polite excuses, that you start avoiding attending weddings.
Just when you think you have been permanently robbed of the pleasure of attending weddings, there is a phase where people begin to believe that you are too old to get married, this usually happens as you cross your thirties. They glance at you, feeling sorry that you are a lone spinster bereft of a companion for life. As the weight and expectations are lifted, you find yourself attending multiple weddings and having fun yet again. No one cares if it is your turn next. So, hang in there, sooner or later, you will be free of the nagging questions, the pesky relatives and perhaps even those fears in your head. It’s a short life to run away, to deny yourself life’s little pleasures. Go on, rock every wedding!