This wedding in India seemed to have a particularly happy vibe. As an outsider, I’m guessing that one reason was that so many guests have been longtime family friends with the families of the wedding party.
I met many people here who’ve said that their families have been friends for three generations, or that they’re old school friends; and lots of the people my age told me that their parents were also somewhere in the crowd.
This atmosphere was particularly noteworthy given the sheer size of the wedding. One night we went to a classical Indian dance performance and dinner with 1,500 guests, and 6,000 (no, that’s not a typo) attended the breakfast/lunch that was held after the actual wedding ceremony.
The wedding took place at dawn, because dawn is an auspicious time.
Of course, there were so many guests at the wedding, and I knew so little about the other people, that I might be completely wrong about surmising that this is a key factor in what seemed a very happy mood.
My sister’s wedding will have that nice atmosphere – though with only two generations of friends from Kansas City, not three. (My parents are both from North Platte, Nebraska.)
There’s a different quality to friends you’ve known from childhood. With these friends, I feel, we can always pick up where we left off. It doesn’t matter if we haven’t talked to each other for five years. And there’s greater intimacy. We know so much about each other that we have nothing to hide. And if it’s not just us, but our whole families, who are friendly with each other, then that feeling of closeness is all the greater.
