Of Weddings and Disney

I have had the honour of attending quite a few Pakistani weddings, mine included. What baffles me is the amount of money, effort and time that goes into the organization of a wedding and other events linked to it, like the mehndi, valima, mayun etc.

Alan Bryman, sociologist and author of The Disneyization of Society (Sage Publications) talks about the disneyization of society, whereby the features of Disney have come to dominate our lives. One of the features of this phenomenon is theming. Everything is about entertainment. Weddings are about entertainment. There are Mughal themes, “Greek” themes, village themes and the list is endless. Why is it that we have to unify everything under a theme? Why can’t the flowers be yellow, the shamiana green (and not white) and the bridal outfit red? What is so wrong with that? It’s more about style than substance; the fact that the wedding is actually a marriage between two people is almost incidental.

This phenomenon of themed weddings has become so rampant that we find ourselves disappointed when we attend one that isn’t. When I saw the movie, Father of the Bride, I thought wow! these Americans spend so much money on their weddings. Hell, they have a wedding planner. Lo and behold, Pakistanis are no lesser mortals. We not only have our very own wedding planners, our weddings and outfits are becoming whiter by the hour. Whatever happened to the traditional reds? Perhaps it’s Disneyized-Americanization. The Review (Dawn) recently carried an article about wedding planners. And believe me there is no dearth of them. Women are appreciated for their talents in arranging flowers, placing candelabras or other elaborate centrepieces, draping yards of tissue along the “stage” and colour coordinating the whole episode. I’m not saying it's easy work, in fact it’s very tedious and requires a lot of creativity. Women are said to have “imagined” their perfect weddings complete with imported orchids and chrysanthemums. Hell, I hadn’t even seen a chrysanthemum in my life till I attended one of these disneyized weddings.

Weddings have in fact become very commercial. Instead of just thinking about the expense of food and venue, one has to now consider the cost of flowers, the outfit (which goes into Rs.One lakh at times – asli sonay ka dhaga lagga hai, the stage, the centrepieces on tables, the going-home gifts (petite boxes filled with imported chocolates or if you’re even cooler, handmade chocolates engraved with the bride and groom’s names), the inevitably white cake, the elaborate bouquet and the list goes on and on.
It seems like we’re bending over backwards to emulate the west. Weddings are no longer the sombre occasions where two families came together. It’s more about what the bride is wearing, which makeup artist she went to, what kind of flowers were bought from Singapore or wherever else, and how grand a function it was. We seem hell bent on trying to amuse ourselves.

In this entire mad race of sorts, where one wedding is better than the previous one, we all but forget about why we’re doing it. Some may argue “you only get married once” – well that’s precisely why you should refrain from such ridiculous extravagance. Why not invest all that money in a fund for the bride and groom? Better yet, why not spend it on getting a girl/boy of limited means married? And preferably not announce it.

Some may argue, you have to do it, or else it appears as if you don’t have the means or don’t love your offspring or some nonsensical reason like that. If we keep trying to beat each other at who has the better wedding, when and where does it stop? Its not as if we need to go out of our way to fathom the unnecessary overspending. In our very own homes, the cook or maid has a million stories to tell. They accumulate as much money as they can when it's time for their daughters to get married. Why is it that we criticize them for giving in to the grooms’ family’s demands while unwittingly (?) we’re reinforcing that very phenomenon? We may live in a cocoon but it affects the outside people. A simple wedding is looked down upon when it should in fact be emulated. There is no concrete reason why we partake in this mad race to have the most entertaining and luxurious wedding ceremony. Why the trend continues in our upper-middle-educated-classes, is beyond my comprehension.