Both groom and bride, along with their guests, organized a lavish wedding on the Internet and they managed to attract thousands of followers.
India is famous for luxury weddings that often last many days. However, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, Sushen Dang and Keerti Narang decided to change the traditional ceremony. They just chose a beautiful day and held their dream wedding on the Internet.
The wedding took place on April 19. And as said by groom Dang, a 26-year-old analyst,
"We never imagined that even our online wedding would be so grand. A hundred guests joined in our celebration on the app. We live-streamed the ceremony on Facebook which was watched by another 16,000 people."
Dang dressed up in traditional sherwani kurta and a turban on his special event. He surfed the Internet from Mumbai, a city alongside the Arabian Sea while bride Narang in a red dress logged on from Bareilly in the Uttar Pradesh state that is adjacent to Nepal.
The priest conducted a chain of wedding rites while he was sitting next to a ritual fire at his house in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Guests of both Sushen Dang and Keerti Narang joined from Delhi, Gurgaon, and Bangalore, the tech hub in the south of India.
While the wedding was taking place, there were some little glitches such as some of the family members accidentally muted their microphone or camera was covered up by pets. However, the wedding showed lots of happiness and fun, and the bride, groom, and their relatives performed Bollywood-style dances.
This wedding attracted about 260,000 views on the Internet, and the new couple suddenly felt as real celebrities.
Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government has issued a lockdown order as the wedding season is coming. In Rajasthan, up to 23,000 weddings were canceled on April 26 – the day of the springtime festival, Akshaya Tritiya.
There are about 10 million weddings per year in the nation with 1.3 billion people. The price of the wedding industry in India is estimated at $40-50 billion. Like many other countries, this nation has had a lot of difficulties due to COVID-19. Event organizers, restaurants, and design companies are ones of the most-impacted businesses.
According to Adhish Zaveri,
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we be the flag-bearers and drive weddings online? A wedding is probably the most important day of somebody’s life. And we thought we have to make it as special and close to a real wedding as possible.”
Adhish Zaveri now works as a marketing director of Shaadi.com, a matrimonial website that held the wedding for Dang and Narang.
Online weddings have become a new hot trend in India during the lockdown. A couple in Uttar Pradesh got marriage in the police office when all of the conventional places including temples, hotels, and banquet halls were closed.
In a bid to protect themselves from the COVID-19, in Madhya Pradesh, a couple worn masks and attached flowers to bamboo sticks to exchange garlands – an important ritual in Indians’ weddings.
Zaveri said online weddings with the cheaper expenses would probably become a good choice for couples who don’t know when the pandemic will end. As per Dang and Narang, this couple spent $1,300 on the ceremony services, and as further said by Zaveri, his company has organized up to 12 similar weddings.
Accordingly, sari-draping experts and make-up artists give support to brides. A singer takes on stirring the air up. And all guests are sent an ID and password to avoid strangers to invade illegally.
Kirti Agrawal got married to Avinash Singh Bagri on April 14 on the balcony of their relatives’ house while their family and friends watched on a video-conferencing application.
In an interview with AFP, Agrawal said,
“Their (groom’s) family had planned a guest list of 8,000 to 10,000. I didn’t say that I am not a fan of big, fat weddings. But when I heard about the wedding-from-home idea, I was very happy.”
The Indian government has issued a severe lockdown from March 25 to control the COVID-19 spread. People are ordered to stay at home, stop using all public transports, railway, and air services. On May 04, some of the strict Coronavirus lockdown restrictions have been eased. India has now been the third focal point of the pandemic in Asia with more than 56,000 cases and over 3,300 deaths.
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