Skip to main content

Bridal Tour

I can't believe us desis are lagging behind the world in the bridal tourism business. For crying out loud we have a Miss Universe and Miss World from India - just that should suffice for marketing the desi woman's eye candy quoitent. It only helps that Bollywood musicals feature oomphy starlets by the dozen.

Something along the lines of A Foreign Affair should find a natural habitat in India. I can picture a bus load of western men traveling from Ludhiana to Cochin to select an aspirant bride to take home to wife. That our girls should fall behind their Ukranian sisters is an anomaly that needs correcting. Done right, this could be a remunerative cottage industry

A full-service outfit like AFA can take a man from mouse-click to matrimony for less than $10,000, orchestrating everything from travel and hotel arrangements to legal services to home delivery of flowers and chocolate—complete with digital photos of the woman's ecstatic reaction—while she waits for her paperwork to go through.

Safety measures like chaperoning the would be bride, an iron-clad pre-nup and ensuring that the man's credit and credentials are fully verified before he steps on the bride tour bus would differentiate industry leaders from fly by night operators. Providing the couple extended warranty in the form of discounted legal aid, marriage counseling, spa and massage services would make good business sense as well.

Comments

ggop said…
HC,
Is the Harper's link ok? I couldn't find the article. BTW my former colleague went to Russia and married a girl after a two or three week stay.
Guess what, the marriage didn't even last two months. She was miserable in America..
gg
Heartcrossings said…
ggop - There's always that possibilty. But if the enterprise is more often successful than it is not,then its probably worth trying.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...