After more than 2 years I attended a wedding last week of a very dear friend. I was very excited because attending a traditional Parsee wedding is rare these days and then you get to meet all your friends and society members all in one place.
My Religion, Zoroastrian is a very small religion, where worldwide now our population stands somewhere to 114k. May be in the next 100 years it will be something of past because of the way it is declining rapidly.
Coming back to the wedding, I had specially planned my trip to India this time around my friend's wedding date as she had intimidated me well in advance. Our wedding ceremonies are for 4 days where we have different rituals to be done. I could not be a part of all the rituals but I did attend a few of them.
On the wedding day the wedding ceremony as per our customs is done just after the the sunset or before the sunrise. Most of the people prefer to do it after the Sunset followed up with a reception, where there is dance, food, drinks and ofcourse lot of fun. There is still a restriction of 200 guest for the wedding. I feel it is quite absurd, now the whole of the city has opened up and there are events happening where 1000s of people are attending, then why would they still want to keep restrictions for someone's personal occasion, specially a wedding which is a once in a lifetime special event for one. Generally in our weddings we have a minimum of 600 to 700 guests and it can go up to even 1000 plus. So if you have a limit of 200, it becomes very difficult to decide who to invite and who not to.
The wedding ceremony is done by 4 priests where they would chant the holy prayers and the bride and the groom will exchange wows. It is an hour long ceremony.
This is the wedding stage set up. Very gorgeously done, I loved the flower set up, it was done very artistically. We have a few places in the city which are based with our customs and we normally do all our ceremonies in these places only.
On the top it is written Shaadi Mubarak, meaning Congratulations on your wedding.
In this particular place, there is a stage and in front of it is an open space for the guests to sit. There is a separate area for food and a separate area for drinks, so that everyone is comfortable. In a wedding normally there is a event planner who plans everything, but in our place we need to contact everyone separately for different things like a Photographer, Stage decoration, Lightings, Food, Music and other arrangements for all of these we have some options and we can select from them. It is easy so people do not prefer to hire a event planner and spend on that part.
The wedding ceremony is completed, the bride and the groom are now meeting the guests.
This is the dining area. Traditionally we have a sit down dinner, where food is served in Banana Leaf. If the crowd is more than the dinner seating happens in rounds, like 1st seating, 2nd seating and so on.
We have traditional dishes served for the wedding, like there is Salli Chicken, it's a sweet and sour chicken served with potato thin strings fried, Patra ni Machi, it is Fish which is marinated in green chutney and then steamed in a banana leaf, this one is a very famous dish in our culture, and the other one served is Mutton Pulao. Then there are side accompaniments also, like CHapati, Pickle and other things.
We enjoy this culture, our friends who are not of our religion for them this tradition is quite a fascination and they look forward to attending a Zoroastrian wedding.
The attire that we prefer to wear in the wedding is a Saree. Again here we have our traditional design sarees which the ladies prefer to wear. One of them is called a Gara, it is a embroidered saree with some very fine designs. I did not wear one of them for this occasion. I wore a lace saree which is also very common in our traditional styles.
Happy me with hubby
It was such a delightful evening, we met up with all friends danced the evening and had a wonderful time. And the best was enjoying the traditional food and the traditions of the evening.
Thank you for visiting my blog. 馃懠馃徎馃懠馃徎馃挅馃挅馃尮馃尯馃尭
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