Bangalore, Day 7 & 8 of Trip

Our plan was to arrive in the hotel in Bangalore in our sumo suits to greet Rahul before the wedding, which we did, but only after standing around in the lobby for a good thirty minutes waiting for him to show up; we were such a novelty the staff was calling people in off the street to come look at us.

After our sumo ambush we only had a few hours before the beginning of the wedding and needed to buy appropriate clothes so we rushed off to Fabindia, which apparently is the place to buy stylish things of the like. Like any guy, Rahul grossly underestimated the amount of time it takes girls to make a decision about an outfit, especially for a wedding, so we ended up being really crunched for time.

The wedding was in some ways very much like what I had pictured an Indian wedding being like, and in some ways very different. Today was only the first part of the wedding, but the whole thing was very similar, so I will describe it once for the whole time.

For starters, it is forbidden to dance in Bangalore, so that kind of gives you an overall impression of the wedding right there; it was heavy on tradition and light on party. It was really cool seeing all of the traditional aspects I had always read about, such as circling the sacred fire seven times, and the marigold canopy people are supposed to be married under, but by the time the second hour of classical music was winding down, all of Rahul’s friends were feverently apologizing to us for the boringness of the wedding.







What sets Indian weddings apart from the rest is the everyone-is-family feeling that is lacking at most western weddings. Although we had absolutely no connection to the bride and groom, and had never met them before, we were included in everything, and not just because we were foreigners, but because everyone was included. People went out of their way to make sure we felt at home – we even had a food coach: one of the cousins of the bride came over to us every time food was served and explained to us what everything was. Despite this we were drinking our soup the wrong way, and at the end of the meal two little old ladies came over to instruct us on the proper way to slurp soup from your palm. The food was indeed one of the highlights of the wedding, that and having a bigger room than the bride and groom in the hotel for some reason.


South Indian Food is very different from northern food in that it is rice based, not wheat based, and it is eaten almost entirely with your hands. Never use your left hand to raise food to your mouth, since traditionally that is your “dirty” hand. The food was served on a banana leaf and consists mainly of rice, three or four main curries, a few chutneys, soups, and ‘salad’, which was basically veggie raita. Throughout the entire wedding we were stuffed with food by men carrying pails of the curry around the tables. They never took no for an answer on second or thirds, by fourths you could sometimes convince them that you were full. Our favorite looked like an Indian Harry Carey and was always popping up right when we thought we had at last cleaned our plates to delightedly pile on more food.


Since there was obviously little revelry at the wedding itself (the bride and groom spent three quarters of the time outside – bad sign), all the young people bought cases of Kingfisher and had a party afterward in our room since it was the biggest. After a few beers rishi was persuaded to read his speech for the wedding to Ani, who was there – even for us who didn’t know ani it made us laugh till we cried. At the end of the night we spent a good thirty minutes trying to take in-air pictures jumping on the bed, much to the chagrin of the “boring couple”.