TAMPA, FL – Indira Malhotra, 28, has shocked her parents by stating that she would like a small, intimate wedding with maybe 100 guests. Her parents are unsure whether she is being serious or not.
“So we’re together with family having dinner and my uncle starts bugging me – again – about when I’m getting married,” said Ms. Malhotra. “That starts my mom going on about what a lovely wedding it’s going to be, how they’re going to dress me up, blah blah. I just nodded and smiled, hoping they’d start talking about someone else’s wedding and get distracted. But then my aunt had to ask how many people my mom planned on inviting. My mom goes “At least 500” with a head shake and that’s when I lost it. I told them I wanted a small wedding with maybe 100 people they all started laughing. When I said I was being serious everyone just stopped and stared at me.”
“You can’t have a wedding with less than 500 people – it’s not a proper wedding then is it?” said Ms. Malhotra’s mother, Gurjeet. “We have a big family, so many people will be coming from India. And we have our friends and community here. There are Indira’s friends from school. There is the American family next door, they are so nice. There are Daddy’s office friends. There are the nice people at the Indian grocery store. Plus we have to invite every single person who has ever invited us to wedding or even thought about it. There’s no way it can be less than 500.”
“I know they’ve been planning the wedding list in secret since I graduated college – maybe even before that,” said Ms. Malhotra. “If my mom & my aunts are hanging out with papers and pens, they’re planning the guest list. But they don’t know what I know: they always get stuck around 350. And then they get desperate. They start thinking of people they haven’t seen in 20 years. Or people they barely know, like the Indian bank teller. Anyone is fair game so they can hit the magic number 500. ”
A spokesman for the Big Fat Indian Wedding Association of America (BFIWAA) declined comment.
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