A Winter in India

The night before Thanksgiving, we wrote several blog entries and in one of them we described a wedding procession that had gone down our street, but we didn’t have any pictures because it was dark. Well, later that same night, another wedding procession came down the street, and this one was much more lavish and elaborate than the first. It was also very well lighted, so we got some pictures.

Let me try to describe the scene. This procession moved very slowly up the street, about 50 yards at a time. Each time it moved forward, it was preceded by a fountain-type firework that lit up the street for a full minute. Behind that was the band (Upper left photo), and behind the band was a line of wedding guests (upper right photo) kind of enclosed in flower garlands and electrical wires that powered the huge chandeliers that were being carried. When the procession stopped, the drummers (middle left) would really crank up the beat, and people danced in the street. It was very Bollywood movie style dancing: first a group of men would dance, then a group of women would dance (middle right). No men and women dancing together. Behind all this was a flower bedecked horse-drawn carriage carrying the groom-to-be (wearing a turban) and several young kids (lower left photo). Behind the carriage walked a man carrying all of the electrical wires, which were hooked into a generator, which was a full-sized truck following the procession. The band and the dancing were loud enough that it overcame the roar of the generator. What a show! Can’t even begin to imagine what this cost, or how far they went. We could hear it for quite a while after it went on past us. And this was just the Groom’s part!