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Discovery of a wedding
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A Bangalore family agreed to be filmed as part of Discovery Channel's series on world weddings coming soon to a TV set near you.
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IN AN increasingly unromantic and globalised world that is brought to your drawing room by television, exotica becomes a prized commodity. And what is more exotic to a firang's eye than an Indian wedding and its concomitant clamour and chaos.
Richard O'Regan and Bree Fitzgerald, freelance photographers and producers for Discovery Channel, were in Bangalore to shoot an Indian wedding for the channel's series on world weddings, One World, Eight Nations. Richard and Bree have already produced the highly acclaimed World Birthdays for Discovery, and have filmed weddings in New Zealand, Brazil, Vietnam, and Italy.
To the Westerner, weddings (like funerals) are solemn occasions. Rigidly seated guests look on stoically while elders of the immediate family wipe away a silent tear. Not so us. Our tonsils and lachrymal glands work overtime, as do our cooks and pandal makers. Everyone troops in and out of the homes of the bride and the groom to look at the saris, jewellery, suits, wrist watches, and so on. And everyone is generous with unsolicited advice on wedding and honeymoon tips.
No wonder the photographers were keen to capture the ambience of a South Indian Hindu wedding, both within the home and outside it, the preparations, decorations, and shopping. As value addition, they also filmed the many historical places that dot Bangalore.
"We were thrilled when the Discovery people chose my daughter's wedding," said Ms. Deshpande, a bank employee, and mother of Rashmi, who wed Anand Hunsagi last month. "Now my daughter and son-in-law will be famous throughout the world!"How did the international channel select this particular wedding? "It was a long, long process," explained Ayesha Sayani, Director of Shunyata, a Mumbai-based production house. "That Discovery chose India as one of the eight nations is itself good news for us. Discovery then wanted us to identify a family that would be representative of the country. This is impossible in a country with so many different cultures, castes, and religions. After screening several families in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, we decided that the world had seen enough of flashy North Indian, Monsoon Wedding sort of celebrations, and so, we chose Bangalore, the IT capital of India, and a Hindu wedding. The channel was keen on English-speaking brides and grooms, and families that were traditional and yet modern. They also needed a family that was comfortable with foreign photographers."
For over a fortnight, Richard and Bree filmed all social aspects of the wedding. "I am fascinated by the rituals and traditions of the Hindu South Indian wedding," said Richard even as he filmed the wedding rituals. "This morning I switched off the camera to have a coffee inside, and when I went back to the entrance of the marriage hall, there was this huge floral arch announcing the wedding of these guys."
The Discovery crew was bombarded with information on the wedding from virtually everyone. "People have been waiting to explain each and every tradition to us. The pujas, the rituals, the protocol, the family trees... we have tonnes of material and footage on all these," said Richard.
Richard and Bree have at least 400 hours of footage. The hard part will be when they have to edit it down to two hours, and those two hours will be what the millions of Discovery International viewers and TLC (The Learning Channel) viewers in more than 155 countries will see later this year. "Though we read up quite a bit on Hindu traditions and practices, our filming has been completely candid," revealed Richard, a Canadian who comes from a family of journalists and photographers.
"Each wedding has been different," said Bree, who has worked in various countries including post-war Afghanistan and Cambodia.
"Since we filmed not just the wedding, but the two weeks that led to the wedding, we learnt a lot." "In New Zealand, the bride took the trouble of talking to several elders to learn all about Maori traditions, and then got married on an island. High drama was when the couple missed the ferry to the venue."
The two were witness to high drama here too. For two weeks, they melded with the families. Added Bree: "The two families are amazing. They have a wonderful bridge between the modern and the traditional. I was thrilled to see the priest speak on his cell phone reverently just seconds after chanting mantras."
Didn't the weddings lose spontaneity with an international channel covering them, I asked. "We've become so much part of the family that we get less attention than the furniture now!" said Richard.
In the Deshpande household, the father, even as a child, had insisted on knowing the meaning of every ritual that his elders asked him to perform. This sensibility, combined with the modern, has in him a forward-looking individual. "After his retirement from the bank, he set up an organisation to help destitute women set up small-scale industries," his wife said with pride.
The Hunsagi family too is equally progressive. When they learnt that Rashmi had been studying psychology even as she worked in a hardware company, they assured her that she could continue to study after her marriage to their son. In fact, software engineer Anand and his parents have encouraged her to quit her job so that she can complete her studies.
Back to Richard, who thrives on variety. He has produced documentaries on subjects as varied as trauma cases in emergency rooms, Romania's abandoned children, biographies of the Wright Brothers, serial killer Ted Bundy, American democracy, and the roots of US-Soviet Cold War. He has won the Peabody Award for his Christian Science Monitor report on "Islam in Turmoil", won two Emmy Awards, and five Emmy nominations.
Bree Fitzgerald owns an independent production company in Canada. "While working on an independent film, Women in Afghanistan, I was touched by the bravery, and the frustration, of the women. The work done by the Afghanistan Women's Media Association is stunning."
For both, India has been a thrilling experience. "If I were married, I would celebrate my wedding anniversaries by repeating our vows according to different customs and nationalities," she confessed.
Richard, who is divorced, would love to get married in India, either to an Indian bride or an American, "provided someone else took care of the funding".
MALA KUMAR
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