The Ultimate Indian Wedding Experience: Part 1
Last week all of the second semester American students were given invitations to "A Traditional South Indian Hindu Wedding," and for the first time in my life I was surrounded by people that had actually found something they were more excited for than Christmas. The invitations were courtesy of a lady who used to run the chai stand in our hostel back before we moved in, which meant that the day of the wedding doubled as the day we met the source of our invitations for the first time. |
To be honest, I still have no idea how she knew who we were...but thou shalt not question the mysterious forces that get you invited to weddings. Multiple days, buses, towns, and markets later we had somehow (miraculously) managed to locate all of the pieces needed for the ceremonial sari's assembly. This meant that there was only one more thing keeping us from being completely wedding-ready: our depressingly henna-less skin. And what better way to cure the absence of creativity than through completely covering yourself with it? | It wasn't until 'Wedding Eve' that we finally rallied our inner artists and managed to convert the lobby of our hostel into a full scale tattoo parlor. We began with all 16 of us desperately trying to channel our inner henna creativity, while squished into a small area filled with random furniture and more henna cones than we could ever need. It wasn't long before we gave up on this strategy and the 4 Indian girls who'd come with us ended up offering to do all of our henna so that it would "look more traditional" (their way of saving us from covering each other in brown blobs). The process of painting all of our hands ended up taking them more than 5 hours since they were so outnumbered. |
The Process | The Results |