Pre-Wedding Challenges

The guest list:  As P.J.’s family is very large and P.J. is in a family business the guest list totaled over 500. So cutting down on the numbers was very tough.

Finding a big enough hall: It is a small quaint town with a population of only 10,000.  We found only one hall large enough to accommodate us- it was at the local college, the location was beautiful and was big enough with spacious grounds (for a baraat), however there were quite a few problems with this location.

Wedding venue logistics: There was only one hall in the entire town large enough to accommodate us and we had previously decided to do both events in one day. We had major logistical issues. We had to perform the baraat, Hindu ceremony, buffet luncheon and Sangeet in four and a half hours, clear the hall by afternoon, move the guests to a hotel bar before going to the church by 5:00 p.m. for the Christian wedding and have the reception hall fully ready by 6:00 p.m. to serve 315 guests for a sit-down served dinner.  Solution - It took an incredible wedding planner and a lot of people to manage the transition: remove the mandap, and change all the seating, décor, and for the caterers to regroup in only a couple of hours.  Without a wedding planner this feat would have been impossible.

The catering arrangements: Surprisingly the only major hall in town had absolutely no kitchen facilities.  And there wasn’t even space inside the building for the caterers.  Once again a little imagination, a refrigerator truck, a wedding planner and incredible caterers came to our rescue.  We found it difficult to find an Indian caterer. There were no Indian caterers within a 100 mile radius. And an Indian wedding is based on good food. So our choices, to bring in caterers from DC, Philadelphia, NY, Edison or Pittsburgh and to find one on short notice as we had used up a lot of our engagement period trying to figure the rest of the details.  We were lucky to find ‘Aroma Restaurant’ out of DC.  They did a phenomenal job and kept to our time table. They brought in a Tandoor, and the entire kitchen – they ran it off gas and coordinated with our local wedding planner.  Our wedding planner had dozens of vendors- two caterers, a cake company, 25+ waiters, busboys and cleaners.

Chambersfest: There was one more issue in the small town. It was having its annual historic day event and 5,000 people were going to be downtown on the same day! This meant no parking space, congested streets, potentially lost guests and no hotels within 20 miles, etc. Solution: local trolleys and we used our wedding website to get the work out to have people reserve their rooms months in advance. This actually worked.  Out of 110 rooms in the hotel our guests reserved over 85 of them.  In the hotel, the hotel restaurant/bar opened for us in between events and after the reception and with five trolleys we were able to guide our guests from the hotel to the church, from the church to the reception hall and from the reception hall back to the hotel.  

So many logistics issues to solve, a 14-hour event, entropy, Indian Standard time and Murphy’s law it might have sounded like we were fully doomed and the event would be a full chaotic disaster.  But somehow, everything went off perfectly and we had a blast!  There was nothing that did not work out.  We hope that everyone’s wedding can be as successful as ours!

Wedding planning advice
1. Give and take- In an inter-faith wedding nothing will be hundred percent towards what you and your parents had envisioned for your wedding. Accept this fact, and remember that marriage is a life-time commitment and will require give and take. And planning a wedding for your families will push you to the edge. 

2. It is all about the bride- Yes, but only on the wedding day. The engagement period is about the two of you and your families and is not always about the bride. 

3. Kids at the wedding- This is always a sensitive thing. We invited the immediate family's children to the Hindu ceremony and the luncheon, and setup a daycare at the hotel during the Christian wedding with full-time running trolley service to get back to the hotel throughout the evening events. This is of course a personal preference and may hurt family's feelings. However, it is hard to stop children from crying. Our event was 14 hours and we decided that this would push the limit of children under 12. We did not invite them to the evening event and we had special RSVP invitations printed for those families who had children. 

4. Plan-plan-plan and keep to your schedule. Decide on the start and end time for each event and don't slip in your schedule. This is difficult. In our case, once we had our guests at the baarat by 11:00 a.m. we were able to maintain their schedules with our trolleys. We used our wedding website to give our guests an itinerary, and requested their presence by 10:30 a.m. SHARP. We also notified guests on our website when the last trolley would run so that they would be at the next event on time. 

5. Enjoy your wedding- Seven and a half months of extensive planning and your wedding is over in the blink of an eye. Have fun. We were lucky that we had the other events because after the first pre-event we realized that the whole event was going to go quickly. We really had a good time and because of the wedding planner our families were also able to have a good time. 6. Plan for disasters to avert them - Think about everything that can go wrong and decide what can be done to correct them.

"Lastly- being married is wonderful- enjoy every day. Being happily married is your goal and the wish of your families. Don't lose sight of this as the wedding is the smallest detail in that master plan."