About the Couple
Pravind works for a renowned law firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in their corporate sector.  He studied in Malaysia most of his life except for three years spent in London reading his degree.  I completed my degree in UK and now work as a trainer in a call centre. Recently we have started an exclusive boutique bringing in fusion wear from India and I have even started dabbling in designing myself.  Pravind has been a great motivator to me and because we are in business together we spend a lot of time which works very well for both of us. 

How we Met 
We met on the 12th of September 2002 at a mutual friend's wedding.  I had gone up to say bye to another friend at the end of the wedding and he happened to be standing with her.  She introduced us but we hardly said two words to each other.  If I recall correctly it was just a plain "hi" and that was it.  But two day later he called me and we arranged our first date for which he was 20 minutes late.  I've since moved his watch twenty minutes ahead.  Unknown to us, our mothers who had been friends for a while had spoken about getting us to meet at the wedding.  But oddly enough they didn't have to introduce us as it worked out.

Our Wedding
Pravind and I got married on the 26th of April 2003 in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur.  It was a very grand wedding with 1300 guests attending. Being a Bollywood buff and having a taste for things that are classy with a touch of flamboyance, I chose the idea of the movie Devdas as my wedding theme. Being Malayalee, we didn’t have anyone who was Bengali in our family so it was all left to our interpretation.  When people first heard of my theme they poked fun at it saying that there would be loads of alcoholics around.  But I persevered.

My theme colours were red and gold so everything had to revolve around these main colours.  I had the canopy outside the house in a harem like design with chandeliers and deep red scallops going around it.  Then there were little fairy lights entwined in the tree branches and the canopy legs.  The tables had off white linen with gold scallops while the chairs looked grand in matching off white linen covers and gold ribbons on their backs.  Each table centre had 5 clay deeyas that my friends and I had painted with gold designs and scattered around them were rose, jasmine and marigold petals as well as gold dust. 

Inside the house saw garlands of rich coloured marigolds and jasmine strung from every corner and hanging down like beautiful showers.  And incense sticks and oil burners helped add the feel and smell to the setting.  The final touch was of course the music from the movie playing in the background.  The wedding mandap itself was a riot of jasmine and marigold with brass bells around the fringe to add to the Devdas look.

I chose not to wear an outfit in the theme colours at my wedding because I wanted all my flower girls to wear those colours.  I had fourteen beautiful ‘thalam’ or tray bearing girls who wore saris in all the flame colours– red, gold, orange, yellow, rust, copper- or a combination of these colours.  They looked stunning and made quite an impact walking down the aisle to the stage where the ‘mandap’ was. 

At my wedding reception held at a hotel, I wore an elaborate red and gold lehenga.  The

give-aways to guests were little brass bells with red organdie ribbons tied to them and people loved it.  We could hear them being ‘tinkled’ all through the dinner.  My husband and I walked into the hall to the song played during the opening credits of Devdas.  This was not available on the audio CD so we had to play the VCD and what an impact the song made.  We also had my 14 ‘thalam’ girls throwing rose petals and blowing bubbles to give that dreamy effect.

All in all it turned out to be a rather dreamy wedding with that little touch of glitz and glamour provided by the colours.