Uncles, aunties, shady cousins and langotya friends are dancing on the streets. Friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers, and a whole bunch of unknown people are queuing up to hit the buffets. Banana leaves will be cut down en masse for people to slurp paysaam from. If you live in Mumbai or Delhi, on this particular day you might as well just choose to stay home, unless of course you’re attending a wedding. [BBC]
According to the Hindu calendar, Sunday is the Akshaya Tritiya day, the first of the four most auspicious days to start new ventures, including entering into wedlock. Astrologer Premila Devi says Akshaya Tritiya is a day that “brings eternal good fortune”.
So, will Sunday see a meteoric rise in the number of startups and small businesses? Hardly.
Sunday will witness a huge rush for weddings in India as a six-month drought of dates considered auspicious comes to an end.
Professional wedding planners claim that around 50,000 weddings are taking place in Mumbai and half that in Delhi.
This mass superstitious hysteria will almost certainly make it an auspicious day for wedding related services – priests, caterers, wedding halls, wedding dancers, jewelers, planners, astrologers, tarot readers and retailers of palang tod paan. Auspicious or not, the denizens of these cities are in for a logistical nightmare. May is the hottest month in India and the temperatures are expected to soar up to 90F(an extremely humid 33C) in Mumbai and 102F(44C) in Delhi. More in Delhi, than in Mumbai, almost every wedding will have the customary baraat clogging up streets. If such stocks existed, Cramer would be, with much histrionics, insist you invest on “Indian wedding stocks”.
It would be interesting to know, if Indian-Americans also succumb to this mass hysteria. Do you know of anyone getting married on this day because of it’s “auspiciousness”? Do you live in India and are part of this mass hysteria or running into some crazy wedding related situation? We’d like to hear from you. Send us emails, comments, pictures or videos.
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