Our Wedding

Those three weeks flew by pretty fast! ... 4 different cities, 2 weddings, 2 receptions, 2 sangeets, hundreds of people and thousands of pictures later, we're finally back in Seattle ...

First order of business, after getting over our jetlag and catching up on some sleep, is getting the house in shape and completing some essential shopping ... Catching up on work has also taken the best part of a week ... And the next step is to get all the photos and videos together and upload them at our website ...

We have more than 3000 photos and hours of videos from all the different ceremonies, and it's going to take a while to sort through them and upload ... Stay tuned!

It starts today ... 10th Feb, 2011 ... Guests will start pouring in all day long from out of Mumbai, and the evening will see the very first ceremony of ours, the Roce ...

Last few days have been busy running around meeting lots of people involved with the wedding ... Priest, DJs, Emcee, Photographers, Decorators ... Also checked out the locations for the first time ... Got a chance to catch up with some old friends in Mumbai before the hustle-bustle begins ...

My parents should be landing in town in the afternoon ... Haven't seen my sister in almost 3 years (since her wedding), so looking forward to that ...

It's 4 am right now, and I'm not able to get much sleep ... Part of it is the residual jet lag effect from the last week, but most of it is just anticipation! ... Got my first airport pickup in a few hours, so should go ahead and get ready in a bit ...


 

I finally reached India yesterday evening at 10 pm ... Feels good to be back home ... It's been a little more than 2 years since my last trip here ... Writing this post from Mumbai, since that's where the first set of ceremonies will take place later this week ...

Food is one of the highlights of any Indian wedding ... Or even any trip to India! ...In the 18 hours that I was here, I have had Dosas, Idlis, Vadas, Chana Chaat, Parathas, Puris, Bhaturas, Pav-Bhaaji and loads of sweets ... And in a couple of hours we'll be leaving to eat Indo-Chinese food at a popular restaurant ... If this is any indication of how the next 3 weeks are going to be, then I'm sure I'll put on quite a few kilos before I leave! :)

I was told that the tradition at the reception after a Catholic Wedding has the bride and groom start off the ceremonies with a Ballroom Dance ... Niether Nalini nor I had ever done anything remotely like this before, so it was definitely something we needed to work on ... If we did not want to end up looking like four left feet at the dance floor!

So about a month back we got our very first lesson at a local dance studio at Bellevue, and yesterday we finally completed the lessons (total only 3 lessons, so don't expect miracles!) ... We have selected "Annie's Song" by John Denver for our intro dance ... The instructors have taught us a basic four-step Waltz.

After the first dance, it is a custom for other couples to join in ... The Groom and Mother of the Groom ... The Bride and Father of the Bride ... The Best Man and Bride ... All the other bridesmaids and groomsmen ... And any other couple who has the enthu to dance ...

It should be fun ... Check out our soon-to-come videos in March to find out how we did in the dance department! ...

Roshan

Thanks for all your compliments on the Jab We Met video!

I'm getting quite a few questions from friends on how I made that video, so I decided to detail the steps below -

Step 1: Prepared a rough storyboard on paper ... Selected all songs for each stage of the story ... A lot of back and forth through email with my sister, Masha, to pick the best ones ...

Step 2: Masha used Photoshop to create the "Bright Lotus" logo and the "Jab We Met" poster at the beginning of the video ...

Step 3: Went to youtube and downloaded all the songs in mp3 format onto my hard drive ... Used www.listentoyoutube.com for that, but there are plenty more options out there ...

Step 4: Opened Powerpoint 2010, and started a deck ... Gathered all the relevant photos together from our photo albums and some from the net ... Powerpoint has a decent Remove Background feature that I used a lot to get the enlarged head effect ...

Step 5: Clipped and combined all the clips using Audacity, a free audio editing software ...

Step 6: Synched the picture animations with the audio ...

Step 7: Converted the powerpoint presentation to Flash (swf format) using iSpring, another free software ... Uploaded finished product to the website!

Whole thing took about 4 days to make, from beginning to end ... Thoroughly enjoyed the whole process!

Roshan

For those of you unfamiliar with the Mangalorean Roce ceremony to be held on the 10th of Feb, here is a little description -

"The Ros Ceremony is conducted one or two days before the wedding where the bride and groom are blessed by their parents in the presence of relatives and anointed with coconut oil. The tradition Of Voviyo which are sung by women is a unique tradition among Mangalorean Catholics during a Ros. Later, it is followed by the traditional Catholic wedding mass and finally the wedding."

Finally ... After a couple of days hard work, the website is up ... And just in time too ... The invitation cards have just been printed out and scanned ... We should be sending them out to everyone within the next few days ... It's exactly 6 weeks to our wedding now, and that's a decent amount of advanced notice to give folks to make their travel arrangement ...

Over the next few months, upto and beyond the wedding, we and others in our family will be updating this blog regularly ... So let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment or two below ...

Thanks for sharing this journey with us!

Roshan and Nalini