Personal touch is virtually dead!
Do you feel slighted if you get an email wedding invitation from a close friend, or even an acquaintance, residing in the same city and getting married some kilometres from your house?
The Internet generation may not mind this and even call you “outdated technology” needing an urgent chill pill in their atypical estimation of the elderly. They may explain how it is an eco-friendly way to extend invitations, how distances and work stresses, how deadlines and other such self-propelling things make an email wedding invite the cool thing to do.
But don’t you think it is the coldest way in the world to invite someone for the biggest occasion of your life? Someone you think should really “grace the occasion.” Someone who’s absence may not go done well for the occasion itself?
The great Indian wedding is all about personal touch, all about making you feel like the most important person in another person’s life, of making you feel the need to be there to attend all the circuitous ceremonies and contribute to the entire hoopla associated with Indian rituals.
One can, perhaps, understand why someone residing in, say, America, needs to send you an invite by email. For one, you may not be attending it but courtesy demands that you are invited and, because a snail-mail invite may take days to reach you, if it really does.
Recently, back from a wedding in another city and of a distant relative, it seems impossible that I would have even thought of going all the way there if they had extended the invite on email. The lady whose son was getting married compelled you to be there by her polite insistence. She called at least a dozen times to tell you how your presence was must, she sent a pre-invite letter seeking your presence and then called again to confirm that a room had been set aside for me. She then sent the actual invite by post and called yet again to confirm if I had received it.
She need not have done this and the knowledge of how she had done all this despite being the only person to arrange for the mega affair compelled you to attend even though it was not immediate family.
Till Internet shrunk distances as it did propriety, this was the norm. Even close relatives would shy from attending a marriage if they weren’t personally invited and the really close ones meant that both the parents of the bride or the groom had to call on them at their residence to personally invite. I can’t remember a wedding in my family when a huge list was not made to segregate the invitations according to priority. All elders in the city were to be sought out by parents; the youngsters by brothers and sisters of the parents and the next rung by the bride and the groom themselves. Only those living out of the city were sent invitations by post but those also after the relevant phone calls were made to extend the invite.
Today, at least in urban India, or should we say metro India, this is not so. Which brings us to the doldrums question: Do people who invite you on email really want you to come? Would they really miss you if you did not download the invite or miss it because it went to spam? Or, is that the purpose — to get as less on venue as possible.
Personally, I have decided that all email wedding invitations from the same city are merely “virtual” dos which should beget your virtual presence. So, the thing to do with them is to extend your wishes through the “send” mode. May be, that’s what is expected of you. You really don’t know. After all these a modern manners which are still evolving!
This leads me to the boy who insisted on dropping me to the station in the dead of the night. He was the bridegroom’s extremely overworked brother who hadn’t slept in three days. But neither he nor his family could think of seeing me off on a taxi, despite my insistence.
The other guy who called me to his wedding through the net would think this one is nuts! He would ask what the fuss is all about? Why does one need to extend politeness to such ludicrous lengths? What’s it with this khatirdaari syndrome?
But then, he would never have taken my heart and my gratitude the way this young man did. There is still this personal way of doing things and one needs to stick to that — not just for propriety but also for that very human feeling.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, November 28, 2010
The Internet generation may not mind this and even call you “outdated technology” needing an urgent chill pill in their atypical estimation of the elderly. They may explain how it is an eco-friendly way to extend invitations, how distances and work stresses, how deadlines and other such self-propelling things make an email wedding invite the cool thing to do.
But don’t you think it is the coldest way in the world to invite someone for the biggest occasion of your life? Someone you think should really “grace the occasion.” Someone who’s absence may not go done well for the occasion itself?
The great Indian wedding is all about personal touch, all about making you feel like the most important person in another person’s life, of making you feel the need to be there to attend all the circuitous ceremonies and contribute to the entire hoopla associated with Indian rituals.
One can, perhaps, understand why someone residing in, say, America, needs to send you an invite by email. For one, you may not be attending it but courtesy demands that you are invited and, because a snail-mail invite may take days to reach you, if it really does.
Recently, back from a wedding in another city and of a distant relative, it seems impossible that I would have even thought of going all the way there if they had extended the invite on email. The lady whose son was getting married compelled you to be there by her polite insistence. She called at least a dozen times to tell you how your presence was must, she sent a pre-invite letter seeking your presence and then called again to confirm that a room had been set aside for me. She then sent the actual invite by post and called yet again to confirm if I had received it.
She need not have done this and the knowledge of how she had done all this despite being the only person to arrange for the mega affair compelled you to attend even though it was not immediate family.
Till Internet shrunk distances as it did propriety, this was the norm. Even close relatives would shy from attending a marriage if they weren’t personally invited and the really close ones meant that both the parents of the bride or the groom had to call on them at their residence to personally invite. I can’t remember a wedding in my family when a huge list was not made to segregate the invitations according to priority. All elders in the city were to be sought out by parents; the youngsters by brothers and sisters of the parents and the next rung by the bride and the groom themselves. Only those living out of the city were sent invitations by post but those also after the relevant phone calls were made to extend the invite.
Today, at least in urban India, or should we say metro India, this is not so. Which brings us to the doldrums question: Do people who invite you on email really want you to come? Would they really miss you if you did not download the invite or miss it because it went to spam? Or, is that the purpose — to get as less on venue as possible.
Personally, I have decided that all email wedding invitations from the same city are merely “virtual” dos which should beget your virtual presence. So, the thing to do with them is to extend your wishes through the “send” mode. May be, that’s what is expected of you. You really don’t know. After all these a modern manners which are still evolving!
This leads me to the boy who insisted on dropping me to the station in the dead of the night. He was the bridegroom’s extremely overworked brother who hadn’t slept in three days. But neither he nor his family could think of seeing me off on a taxi, despite my insistence.
The other guy who called me to his wedding through the net would think this one is nuts! He would ask what the fuss is all about? Why does one need to extend politeness to such ludicrous lengths? What’s it with this khatirdaari syndrome?
But then, he would never have taken my heart and my gratitude the way this young man did. There is still this personal way of doing things and one needs to stick to that — not just for propriety but also for that very human feeling.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, November 28, 2010
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