Skip to main content

Picture Perfect

This story about a woman who is a professional bridesmaid made for a fun read - particularly loved the infographic that details the cost of being one (the regular kind). It could put a serious dent in the budget of a young woman. I was watching a movie recently where the woman tells her long-time boyfriend that she wants her wedding to be perfect because that's supposed to be the best day of her life. It is pursuit of such perfect that makes it possible for a professional bridesmaid to exist. A wedding so perfect that is the best day of a person's life seems both like an impossible bar to achieve and also somewhat tragic. Life could be full of many wonderful (even spectacular) moments. Most people get married relatively early and still have the majority of life left to live. It's sad to think that the high point is long gone since nothing can exceed the greatness of a perfect wedding.

If instead, the pressure is taken of that one day and its allowed to be of many joyful things in a person's life, then balance might be restored. Some couples I know who have been happily married for most of their lives had the most unremarkable weddings. They can barely recall the details and the pictures from the event are fairly mundane. They may have a great story about how they met or at what point they decided they want to get married. This lovely chance encounter story is the kind of stuff some lucky people have in their lives - it is also the kind of story that everyone else wants to hear and marvel at. I doubt these folks had the most picture perfect lineup of bridesmaids at the wedding - the lack of it obviously did not matter, 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more