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17,000 weddings over the weekend in Delhi

Marriages are made in heaven and celebrated on earth. The timings appear to be rather odd.

It has been reported that Delhi celebrated 17,000 weddings over the 4th weekend of Nov, 2008. I had the (mis)fortune of having 7 invites. All mandatory to attend. So it was a game of musical chairs and hours spent on the chaotic jammed roads of Delhi. Delhi farm houses with more than 100 food stalls at one end and 20 food stalls with at least three cuisines at the other end were decorated to meet the stringent demands of discerning friends and relatives for whom food is a yardstick of how good the marriage celebration is.

Look at the recession time:

The minimum guest arrangements were for 400 people and max for 2,000 people. On a little more probing, the food cost per head ranged from Rs 700 to Rs 2000 per person. Averages can be misleading but for the simplicity sake doing some basic maths

Marriages 17,000
Guests@ 800
Food @ 1,000
Decoration@ 5,00,000
Jewellery@ 1,00,000
Guest travel@ 500
Band etc@ 20,000


That is staggering Rs 3,100 cr over one weekend. And that too in one city and also on conservative estimates.

Just as I was travelling from Capital to a B class town by NACIL (Air India), I observed a large number of people who were dressed as if either they were going to attend a marriage or coming after attending a marriage.

As I drove from airport to my hotel, I came across at least fifteen marriage decorations on Monday night.

Maybe there are many more such weekends and week days.....

I now would tend to believe that estimate of Rs 50,000 cr for "marriage industry" seems to be an under estimate.

Job cuts, increased savings, lesser expenditure can wait or it is meant for others....
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Comments

  1. Babu Bhaskaran26 November 2008 at 14:16

    This probably is the strategy of the government to get the economy back into shape! ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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