The Hindu Business Line : The wedding planner

The buzz for this year's December weddings has already begun with Shaadi Expo that offered advice on everything from wedding attire to travel and finance.

A little over a decade ago, if you walked into the famous Purohit restaurant near Churchgate station for lunch, you would have come across an elderly gentleman quietly occupying a corner table. He was there all day, running a marriage bureau in the restaurant. It was a convenient venue — if the anxious families he met scented a match, they could just move on to another table, order something to eat, and get to know each other better over a meal.

In this Internet age, a great deal has changed. The vegetarian thalis have given way to pizzas and pastas, tradition has met technology and your computer is the new marriage broker. Old-fashioned marriage bureaus will never lose their appeal; Priya Shah, for instance, just had a double celebration for the 10th anniversary of her Saptapadi International Marriage Bureau and first anniversary of her magazine The Marriages of India.

Now, however, Web sites like Shaadi.com provide online match-making services as well, and as Anurag Gour, Group Manager, ShaadiTimes, puts it: "The Indian marriage industry is going through the throes of change."

With so many big bucks involved, the phrase `marriage market' has acquired a whole new meaning, and while it isn't marriage season yet, the buzz for this year's December weddings has already begun. The World Trade Centre in Mumbai saw a Shaadi Expo between April 15 and 17, offering advice on everything from wedding attire to travel and finance. There were even 50 astrologers and pandits, among others, at the Astro Zone; in fact, the event was inaugurated by an astrologer; Marjorie Orr from the UK.

Of course, there was a fashion show featuring designs by Shaina NC, Neeta Lulla and Gautam Kapoor and models like Candice Pinto, Sandhya Shetty, Aanchal Kumar and Tejaswini Kolhapure. What made it uniquewas that amidst all the razzle-dazzle, there was also a Swayamvar for more than 100 disabled persons suffering from problems such as cerebral palsy, multiple disabilities and cured leprosy.

His heart is in arts

On the books and theatre front, there were some unusual shows last week of American Performance Pie, an adaptation of excerpts from two books — Richard Rothman's short stories from Intelligent Endings and Gary Richardson's novel The Mad Horses of Matheran.

Rothman, who is the US trade commissioner and commercial consul in Mumbai, writes what might be described as some bizarre and wacky stories, of greed and other human failings. Bollywood's casting couch might have been in the news lately, thanks to the Shakti Kapur controversy, but he wrote a story on the theme several months earlier, with a surprise twist at the end. He also has a story, It's Got to Be Love, about a desperate husband who tries to woo his wife with a potion made from 100-year-old extinct herbs. Meanwhile, Richardson's book is a fictionalised account of how a multinational tries to take over this hill station by killing all the horses there. He has lived in Matheran with his Indian wife Millie and spent four years writing the book.

You have to suspend your disbelief a little bit with both books, but there is no denying that they are completely original, and the high-profile cast, including Alyque Padamsee and Dolly Thakore, even make them seem believable. Ask Padamsee what it was about the work that attracted him and he says, "I was missing being on stage, and Gary was very persuasive!"

Actually, Padamsee hasn't been completely away from the theatre scene. He recently did some interesting work with P Dialogues, a tongue-in-cheek answer to Mahbanoo Mody Kotwal's presentation of The Vagina Monologues. Now, he's working on a new show called Unspoken Dialogues. Padamsee says it will be about real-life situations in which we find it impossible to tell our near and dear ones what is really going on within — such as the woman who finally tells her mother (now dead) that she was upset at being so neglected. Shows like this, unfortunately, never attract huge audiences — the opening night of American Performance Pie attracted a diverse audience that included film-maker Govind Nihalani and builder Surendra Hiranandani — but the second show, on a Saturday afternoon, was thinly attended. However, though small, the audience is generally appreciative and there is a special creative pleasure in experiments such as these, so hopefully, we will see more such events in the city.

`Scary' gimmicks

Incidentally, if you see a young man on a bike being chased by goons in a Toyota on busy streets, don't panic. It happened a couple of weeks ago in three locations in the city — near Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Eros cinema and Fame Adlabs in the suburbs. It turned out simply to be Kamal Hassan's latest gimmick to promote his movie Mumbai Xpress. In a city already so full of traffic jams, do we really need situations such as these?

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