Tina Checker and Sanjeev Mehrotra's Wedding on June 15th, 2002 in Virginia, near D.C.

They held an interesting and lovely ceremony based on a traditional Hindu wedding. I was told that the actually ceremony differs from regions to regions and from families to families. Since they are from the northern part of India, I was told this is more of a North Indian ceremony. I was also told that the wedding would go on for several days.

I was very excited to see it since this was my first Hindu wedding. I wore my traditional Korean costume for this occasion for the second time. I felt it wouldn't look too out of place (I wouldn't wear it to a Korean wedding, for example).

In a lot of ways, the traditional Indian wedding reminded a lot of the similar customs and qualities of the traditional Korean wedding. The wedding is organized by the bride's family and is (used to be) held at the bride's house/town. The groom's family, as a group, would come from another town with the groom riding something like a horse. The family members get introduced to each family, followed by a lengthy formal ceremony (which not that many people are interested in :p). The basic idea is that the bride's family is "giving away" the bride (usually to another town) and she becomes the grooms family. Maybe, this is common to most of the traditional society where big families are maintained.

I've been told that these days it's gotten a bit simpler and a lot of the weddings get held at wedding halls. I guess, as with Koreans, they also need to adapt their traditions to the lives of the modern society.

I wish Tina and Sanjeev many many years of happy memories.

Hong.

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