Another gratitude post

February 15, 2022 / Srishty / Leave a comment

I don’t remember what exactly but ~~yesterday~~ few days back I was seeing someone’s wedding reel on Instagram. Something I enjoy a lot, any kind of wedding planning content or seeing the festivities in action is fun for me. That day, though, I felt a tinge of jealousy on seeing the people in the video look so carefree. As I have mentioned in my wedding related posts here, I was tensed on my wedding days & for what stupid reasons! We had planned a wedding together in the mountains, which itself is quite a feat & to think our parents & siblings were so supportive & helpful. To top that, I hold my friends very close to my heart who are always there and happy for you. I am really judging myself for being tensed at the time!

However, at that very moment, I got struck with a very valuable thought. How people talk about marriage being the thing you should be excited for more than the wedding. And I realized, just how happy and carefree I feel in the routine after my marriage – everything about it – all the goods & bads in daily life. I have written on similar lines here. It is truly a blessing and I feel anxious putting it out here in as many words. I feel a little conscious while writing about personal stuff always even if I its really basic things. 😀 However, I just wanted to put it out here. I am grateful for this, immensely.

While typing this post out, I thought of one more thing. I was reading this post & this one yesterday and today I saw an uplifting sort of social media message on ‘how your life is happening right now, make the most of it’ and it made me realize just how important it is for anyone to make the most of their daily life so that they feel happy in what it is right now. Whether it comes naturally or you have to make an effort for it, there’s no better way to be, it seems. It’s a beautiful thing to observe that many of us are striving for it, irrespective of something that didn’t go as per your expectations.

The uncomfortable bits | Talking about my Wedding | #3 | Blogmas 12

December 24, 2021December 24, 2021 / Srishty / 5 Comments

I have written about my wedding here and here. If you go to these posts, you would realize that I was very keen on logging all details about my wedding on the blog. I’ll also tell you the reason. For the longest time, i have loved reading wedding blogs. I love wedding planning to bits, and I had wanted to cover all details of my own when it happened. However, even when I was typing those above linked posts, I knew that something would stop me from continuing with a well-planned wedding series. I am going to address that something today.

I went through a super tensed time when I was getting married and to think that we were both lucky to have a wedding of our dreams, a sort of unachievable dream, i.e. getting married in the mountains, it’s pathetic that I was so tensed that I find it difficult to recall happy memories from those two days which should have been a happy vacation.

The funniest but also the sad bit? Most of it seems like nothing when I look back. I mean not nothing, nothing but, you know, not worthy enough to be that tensed that you don’t enjoy your own wedding, which, by the way, should be your top most priority if you are getting married. This is also what most people end up not doing.

I’ll give some basic idea on why I was so tensed. Just so it’s recorded here and even the reader is involved. 🙂 The thing is, like I mentioned, I love wedding planning and the stress was nothing to do with any logistics or wedding planning related stuff. In fact, i remember i got my day 1 function’s outfit right before leaving for Mussoorie, the destination for our wedding, and I had picked some random jewellery to go with it, thinking that I’ll take a call after reaching what jewellery to mix and match. You know what i am saying? I was not so worried about these things.

The cause of my worry was an amalgamation of all the various rows and fall outs my extended family kept having. It’s not unheard of in Indian weddings. It’s also pretty common that the bride and groom’s sides will have many disagreements (which also happened but it was not as stressful as the first cause, plus I have to give it to Rahul for how much he went out of his way to take care of this part so that I am least affected). But the first part, which is my extended family’s fall outs, is something that took all my strength to deal with, emotionally. I know now that it’s not that big a deal maybe. Or even if it is, i just need to make peace with the fact that you can’t make everyone happy. In fact, i was so uncomfortable with writing all this that I couldn’t write about my wedding until now, almost 3 years!! And I know I can’t move to the good part until i address this because despite all the good, amazing things, i don’t recall happy memories when I look back. I was tensed.

It started after our parents had met and formally announced things. we call it ‘Roka’. Since it was only our parents who met, some family members got offended that they weren’t made a part of this (my dad had phoned them about the meeting prior). After this, when parents started discussing next steps, Rahul and I were still making up our mind on the feasibility of a destination wedding. Why this thought even came is because we were both clear that we like the idea of a two-day vacation sort of scenario where everyone is staying put at one place and I have always loved the idea of getting married in the hills. But, anyhow, we hadn’t gone that far until this point. We were just thinking about a two-day plan and were adamant on not doing any ceremony right after the announcement. My dad, on the other hand, considered it very important that the extended family members meet. After a lot of to and fro, it was decided to have a small ceremony at Rahul’s parents new place. Since all of my extended family lives in North India, my dad didn’t want to put the pressure on people to travel to Surat for such a small ceremony. He just wanted to formally introduce the family members. So, what he did was book flight tickets for one person from each family entity to travel and attend the ceremony. i am not getting into why is this needed etc, but since he really wanted this, we went along. In hindsight, it would probably have been better to just invite people and leave it upto them as to who wants to travel, but the fact that he took the pain to book tickets for everyone without burdening them for travel was not at all appreciated. Instead of receiving congratulatory messages, I got such angry messages from my cousins about why they weren’t considered important enough to join and so on. I cried throughout my return trip after the ceremony. I don’t know how I would have felt if i was in their shoes but I know one thing for sure, no matter how much I don’t like the way things are done, i am not going to have a fall out on somebody’s important day. Its too toxic, doesn’t matter if it’s out of love.

Things just went downhill from here until the two days of the wedding festivities that happened months later. Yes, even the day right before those two days, people were picking stuff to complain about and I am pretty sure that this would not have been me. I would never complain so much about logistics etc on somebody’s important day, not just wedding. I don’t want to put that much added pressure on someone, and here, people were specifically calling me to crib about things like why is xyz not invited. I mean, if you are an Indian, you know how it is. How everyone has an opinion. My problem is just that you should be more considerate before you decide to bother someone who is in the midst of hosting something. I am just thankful that on the actual two days of the main event, everyone had a lot of fun & no quarrels ensued on those two days.

I am not going to nit-pick this topic further, i just wanted to get it out of my system before I post about fun wedding stuff. Although, (i know i am writing this for the third time in this post), its just sad that looking back I recall all the tension this caused in my head while i should be recalling happy moments. The only time when I was totally in a blissful and happy mental state was during our dance performance on day 1 (which was engagement and sangeet).

I can’t say why but this has taken a lot of guts for me to write down. Do share your thoughts when you get to reading it. 🙂

161 | The Proposal | Talking about my Wedding | #2

June 9, 2019October 11, 2019 / Srishty / 7 Comments

I am beginning to write this on 21.11.2018. By the time it goes live on the blog, it would have been at least 4 months. Around a couple of days before 21.11.2018, I realized that this needs to be logged on the blog immediately (everything does, but this even more so and you will know why by the end of this post). I’ll be publishing this post some day after I am already married which at this point seems likely to be happening in April, 2019. Till then, this post will happily sit in my drafts!

Rahul was flying down to Bangalore for my birthday. (I hope by the time this post goes live our long distance is over!). He had made a nice, fancy dinner plan for the two of us. I didn’t think much of it because I am always nagging him that we never make any fancy plans. (Truth is its not just him, its me also. We are both the kind of lazy people who end up just chilling in the name of fun instead of doing something fancy or adventurous. But I like to put the blame on him conveniently). So, I thought he is just trying to make up for the lack of our fancy plans, simply because its my birthday. I didn’t even think remotely of there being anything more to it.

Then, there were few other plans which I had in mind for the next couple of days and based on other friends’ convenience, I was trying to figure out if we could switch that dinner plan. He was hell bent on not altering that plan and Rahul is absolutely the kind of chilled out guy who is never hell bent on stuff, unless it really makes a difference. So, is there something more to the dinner plan that makes a difference? I thought and then shrugged it off again with the same logic that since its my birthday and if its not made special enough, I’ll crib about it for the rest of our lives. This logic is very valid, by the way, because Rahul does a lot of things which he can later point out in fights that look, you think I don’t do xyz, but see I did it at so & so point! 😀 So, anyhow, I didn’t pay much attention to this suspicion that had risen inside my brain. Then, one day, he very casually mentioned that since we are going to a fancy place and I know you like dressing as chilled out as possible while having fun, I am telling you now itself that try dressing fancy because we hardly ever go to fancy places. At least we should dress fancily sometimes. Now, this was surprising. Rahul does not bother at all if I am at my chilled out best even in a really fancy place. This definitely gave me a lot of logic to think that there’s more to the evening than just my birthday.

The day of his arrival came. I was super excited to just see him, and I really didn’t have any space in my mind left to guess about what the evening holds. I was way too excited to just see him! We were meeting after 3 months post my assignment in Dubai, as I was there on a mission visa and I couldn’t travel out of the country during that. We went to this place called By The Blue in Bangalore, which is nice by the way as a place but its kind of too silent which starts to feel creepy at night if other people do not arrive quickly :D. They do have good food I feel! Anyway, we were enjoying our food and loads and loads of talks. Now I could totally see that Rahul is buying time to keep seated there as much as possible instead of us simply leaving as we were long done! Which, again, I thought to be perfectly alright because he might have wanted to get the birthday cake at 12 being cut at that place only. Hence, I just went along.

In the midst of all the talking, I didn’t realize when the clock struck 12. Now, this is the point where you know why this post needed to be recorded on the blog absolutely. Despite all the hints mentioned above, I was totally shocked/surprised/too dazed to react/frozen brain/embarrassed/confused/overemotional/nervous that I have no clear memory of what exactly ensued. Everything is just a big, huge blur. I do not remember when it hit me either. Was it after the song started that he asked the hotel guys to play? Or was it after looking at the ‘Will you marry me’ cake? I definitely do remember that as soon as the song’s tune started, I knew it’s a proposal song (maybe I had heard it somewhere before). And I do think that the cake arrived afterwards. But, really, I am not sure. And, then, as soon as, I began to realize that he is going down on one knee, I became so conscious of the fact that there are so many people around and I don’t want him to go down on one knee in front of these random people. Thankfully, I realized that I cannot make him stand by force so I simple covered both sides of my face with my hands and started saying in an alarming manner – get up, get up, get up, don’t do this! Hahahaha, sounds so silly now. Since Rahul was also pretty nervous (and I am sure it does take a lot of guts to go down on one knee to propose in front of so many people, especially if you are the kind of simple person who doesn’t get the deal with proposals and is probably doing it to avoid future nagging :D), so I was saying, since Rahul was also pretty nervous and he saw the panic in my voice, he quickly just put the ring in my finger and got up and we hugged. Then, he went to the hotel guy who had helped him plan it out while he was still in Mumbai to ask about the video that he had asked the hotel guys to make for the proposal. Shock, horror, gasp! Apparently the guy was playing the song, so he had no way to make a video. Even though he had told Rahul very confidently that ‘everything will be taken care of’. On that day, we were having so many emotions in our heads that it probably didn’t hit us much but gradually it has hit us badly that since it was all a blur because of the overflow of emotions and there isn’t a video, with time, its going to get even more blurry. Hence, I should log it down on the blog as soon as possible.

And that, my friends, is the story of my proposal. Oh, and, thankfully I was sane enough to take a picture of the cake. 🙂

151|Talking about my Wedding|#1

May 31, 2019October 11, 2019 / Srishty / 12 Comments

Yes, as some reading my past posts figured, I am married. Those of you who follow me on Instagram also know. For the longest time, I have been meaning to write down about my wedding and things in general leading up to my marriage and afterwards. In fact, I wanted to start writing about the wedding bit before it happened itself. As it always happens with Indian weddings though, there is a lot on your plate to handle, especially if you are anything like me – too involved in every decision – you simply do not see a moment to sit back and write. Moreover, I had just joined a new job 2 months before my wedding which is very hectic.

So, here we are now. My job hasn’t got any less hectic, but something else has happened: Even when I was in the moment of the wedding, I could feel just how quickly everything is happening, I was almost thinking what’s the point of buying this wedding lehnga when you barely wear it for a couple of hours. 😛 And, now, our wedding pictures have come which I am finding extremely unsatisfactory (compared to my expectations). Especially because we had a hill wedding, a dream quite difficult to fulfill, and to know that the location hasn’t been utilized nicely in pictures by the photographer is more than quite a bummer.

So, even though I have quite a lot of pending office work right now, I am just starting off writing about my wedding as much as possible because it even felt like a blur when it was happening and I am scared of the pictures. I want to document each & every detail on the blog.

Looking forward 🙂