Travel Blog: An Indian Wedding

India, Day 9

A wedding?  In India?  I was excited when my host informed me that we would be in attendance at a wedding after our morning outreach on day nine.  Staying at a home in most areas of India means that you surrender your ability to plan anything longer than eight hours ahead of time.  It's just the way the culture operates.  In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart's Rick has a great exchange with a woman in his cafe:

Yvonne: Where were you last night? Rick: That's so long ago, I don't remember. Yvonne: Will I see you tonight? Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.

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Those lines are snappy and witty to hear in a film, but in India, that attitude is more often than not a region-wide reality.  By this point, I was accustomed to surprises in my daily itinerary, and I was happy to learn that this surprise in particular was going to be a lot of fun.

Getting to the wedding took some doing; there hadn't been much rain in our area, but there hadn't been a lot of direct sunlight either.  As such, the roads were still slurries of muck, always at least five inches deep.  To make travel even more fun, we had a little competition for road space as we pulled up to the group of houses in the village where the wedding was to take place.  There was a bus parked on one side of the road and several tractors and ox carts going back and forth, and our faithful Bolero had to take the outer edge of the road to get into the village complex.  The truck got stuck for a minute or so, but our intrepid Driver was able to negotiate his way through it.

We disembarked and I took in the scene.  I've photographed a lot of weddings, but I've never photographed an Indian wedding ceremony.  I've always wanted to, but the opportunity never presented itself back home.  And now, I was at an Indian wedding, in India.  A Christian Indian wedding, no less.  Life is funny like that.

An impromptu wedding venue had been constructed in the courtyard between some houses.  An immense tent hung from poles on two sides, with the other two sides attached to the houses.  Inside, sunlight filtered through the fabric to wash everything and everyone beneath it in an electric, technicolor glow.  Musical instruments were held in readiness for the ceremony, while the pre-ceremony environment was supercharged with music from a boombox connected to a set of speakers that blared chants and songs for a good quarter-mile.

The ceremony began about an hour after we arrived, and the girls raised their voices in a chanted refrain as the musicians began making live music.  The groom entered from stage right.  He was dressed entirely in white, except for his bright ride Puma sneakers.  The bride emerged after nearly another hour of music.  The music had died down and the ceremony was underway, with a short "homily" from the officiant preceding the vows proper.  The content, all delivered in Hindi, was entirely lost on me of course, but I was content to observe the goings-on and assume that the message wasn't too different than the wedding messages I hear back home.

We had to leave before the end of the ceremony, sadly.  The wedding began a full two hours behind schedule (even in India, that seemed pretty extreme to me), and Driver had appeared at our elbows to whisper that he was only on the clock for a little while longer, and we needed to move on if we wanted him to drive us home.  So, we left early.

I was intrigued by the expressions on the bride and groom's faces.  Unlike the weddings I've attended and photographed for years back home, I saw no signs of emotion in the couple.  There are usually some hints of shyness or happiness on one or both faces, but on these two, I saw only stoicism.  I asked one of my host's colleagues about this.

"Why did the bride and groom look like that?"

"Like what?"  He seemed surprised.

"They looked sad."

He nodded.  "Ah, yes.  They are actually very happy, but they are leaving their families now, so for that reason they are looking sad."

Intriguing.

Favorite Blogs: Food!

Among my friends and relations (and anyone who follows me on Instagram), it's no secret that I love food and that I love to cook.  I follow a low-carb, grain-free diet, (primal style), and rather than feel restricted by it, those slight limitations inspire me to stay creative with meats, vegetables and spices in the kitchen.  Food is meant to be enjoyed. I am also extremely interested in food culture and culinary history.  To be entirely honest; my obsession with health has created a bit of a monster--I always want to find out why people eat what they eat, especially in America, where choice reigns supreme and cuisines from around world are represented in all their splendor.

In my mission to stay open minded, inspired and creative, I subscribe to a few blogs which keep my palate and my mind working tandem.  Today's blogroll includes a list of a few of my favorite food and cooking-related blogs:

• Anthony Bourdain - Did you know that the cynical host of "No Reservations" has a tumblr account?  Well, he does.  He posts his thoughts on shooting the show, as well as his own ideas about world foods and food culture.  Personally, I'm a big fan of Tony Bourdain.  We share a love of meat in tube form, and I appreciate the fact that he differentiates between the image of a culture's advertised cuisine versus the reality of what people actually eat, while still acknowledging the significance of of both styles of food.
• The Foodie and the Family - In line with my own primal/paleo lifestyle, this blog is a great inspiration for gourmet cooking with the family in mind.  The paleo diet is based on a wheat-free diet that is generally low in starch and high in protein, and TF&tF is great for ideas that are not only extremely creative in their ingredient combinations, but appetizing enough to appeal to the whole family.
• The Food Lover's Kitchen - Another paleo recipe sharing hub.  Much like The Foodie and the Family, this site offers many extremely creative recipes, constant reminders of how truly delicious it is to eat healthily.  But the true hallmark of Food Lover's Kitchen is that it is an interactive web site, with new recent additions of user-made meal plans, recipe books and kitchen profiles.  If you don't need or want to spend a lot of time logging your kitchen into a web site and all you're looking for is a good recipe, don't run off, because Food Lover's Kitchen boasts one of the cleanest and most comprehensive databases available.
• Happy to Serve You - Life is too short to waste time on sub-par coffee, and although this web site is Australian, its sensibilities concerning coffee are on par with anything one might expect from Portland itself.  Happy to Serve You is hopelessly devoted to artisanal coffee and the people and equipment who bring it from the bean to cup.  The team behind HtSY doesn't update the page very often, but their site's uniqueness, the quality of the photography and reviews (covering shops, beans and equipment) have it firmly anchored in my bookmarked RSS feeds.  In case you haven't guessed it; I, love, coffee.
• Paleo Spirit - Like most of my favorite blogs, I enjoy this one for the author's personality as much as its content.  Lea is a great writer who includes her family in her blog as much as possible.  She is also a vocal Christian, which is hard to find in the paleo community.  She goes the extra mile to review some awesome restaurants, letting the rest of us know where the best places to find good, real foods are in major cities.  She also includes her kids in many of the posts, not only as taste-testers and photogenic kitchen subjects, but as contributors, such as a recipe her son posted, based on the lamb stew in Suzanne Collins' bestselling novel The Hunger Games.
• The Primal Kitchen: A Family Grokumentary - One more family-oriented, Christian primal eating site.  This one I followed to first show my mother that it was possible to maintain a grain-free diet and still make family meals, but I continued to follow it because I found the voice behind the blog engaging.  "Mrs. Grok" is just like you and me, but she uncompromisingly follows through in her conviction to feed her family healthily (and feed them extremely well) in a way that makes the rest of us very jealous.  And, somehow, she and her husband find time to raise a family and actively participate in CrossFit.