Ticket to the big-fat Indian wedding

The big-fat Indian wedding has always been an object of wonderment for the West — the song, dance, colour, food and rituals make for a rich cultural experience. Join My Wedding, an Australia-based start-up is taking the Indian wedding extravaganza a notch higher, by allowing couples to sell tickets to their weddings to curious travellers, who wish to be a part of the shebang.

Dubbing the ‘arrangement’ wedding tourism, Pallavi Savant, the marketing head of the startup explains that the idea came when the strategy head of Join My Wedding, Marti Matecsa attended a wedding in India.

“The wedding took place in 2012 in Tamil Nadu, and it got Marti thinking,” informs Pallavi. “She was very enamoured by the wedding, the flowers, the jewellery and the colours. Weddings in the West are rather limited in terms of rituals and are on a much smaller scale than Indian and Asian weddings.” Marti joined hands with Orsi Parkanyi later to start Join My Wedding last year.

Pallavi, who joined the team later, also points out that unless one has an Indian friend; it’s next to impossible to be a part of such a function. Thus, was born the idea of allowing foreigners planning vacations to India to buy tickets and be a part of a wedding soiree in the country.

To-be married couples in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, too, are using Join My Wedding platform to part-finance their big day. The ceremonies are set to take place in a typical Telugu style with decorations consisting of flowers and mango leaves in rich colours, as the bride and groom will be united in the presence of Panchabhutaalu.

Murali Mohan and Srilatha from Hyderabad, who are getting married on August 8, have registered themselves on the website, and so have Siva and Sruthi from Vishakapatnam, who will be getting married on August 25. The entree tickets to their wedding are available on the website for $100 each.

Says Namrata Nataraj, who along with soon-to-be husband Nitin Bathi has registered her wedding on the site, “We’ve not seen anyone selling tickets to their wedding ever. So, having total strangers at our wedding was an exciting prospect.”

Namrata further explains that she and Nitin thought it was a great idea to meet new people. “For instance, if someone from another country comes and attends our wedding, and we happen to visit that country some day, it’ll feel so much better to have friends in an alien country.”

Urvi Ambavat from Mumbai, who has also registered on the site, along with fiancé Paras Shah, has a more pragmatic approach to the idea. “There’s nothing concrete. We’re expecting to come out of this in terms of forging bonds with the guests. People visit India for its rich culture and our weddings provide that; it’s supposed to be a part of an Indian tour experience.”

Given the uniqueness of the idea, Pallavi and the start-up team had some misgivings about bringing in the money factor for wedding tickets.

“You know how people perceive weddings in our culture,” she says with a sigh. “They are prestigious events. The first problem was, ‘why someone would invite total strangers to their wedding’ and second was ‘why they would charge them’. We had to explain to patrons that putting a price on the attendance will avoid travellers and couples alike to not take this for granted. Besides, you will have to allocate a few friends or relatives to help these travellers out with everything from explaining rituals to taking care of their needs.”

The website also takes a 15 per cent commission fee with the whole deal. “It’s completely up to the couple to put a price on their wedding tickets,” continues Pallavi. “When you call people to your wedding, and say it’s a four-day affair, there’s a lot of cost involved, especially with lodging and food. For a regular family, an additional cost of say '50,000 means a lot.”

Both Urvi-Paras and Namrata-Nitin have priced their wedding tickets at $300 per person. “We already have a guest list of about 1,200 people coming in,” says Urvi.

“For our families, the number of guests didn’t make too much of a difference. We quickly did the math before pricing our tickets and realised the major cost was that of lodging in the hotels we’ve booked for the guests. We threw in meal costs and came down to this figure. But we’ve got people asking us, how you can risk absolutely crazy people coming in for the wedding, but we thought we’ll give it a try anyway.”

Pallavi says that the company has several layers of checks before they allow either couples or travellers to sign up. “The number of weddings that make it to the website are barely 30 per cent of what we get. Every wedding goes through a screening process. Both couples and travellers are made to fill a questionnaire and only once we’re satisfied with the authenticity do they make it to the list.”