Vidya Balan and Siddharth Roy Kapur's wedding bash - Page 14

Originally posted by: chocolover89

Oh Vidya, I love you, but...apne shaadi ke time pe toh at least you could have picked a nice, beautiful saree that doesn't make you look twice your size...and wear it properly! If you don't know how, then get help na.. ..

Originally posted by: Nitu_TheTwisted

Bless you, Vidya Balan, for not having a big fat Indian wedding!

by Venky Vembu Dec 14, 2012

As a hormonal teenager growing up in the 1970s, I was so enamoured of Shabana Azmi that I took up the courage to write to her with a suggestion that we elope. She was some 14 years older than I, and not quite the star she later became, but something about her ' perhaps a mix of the cerebral and the sultry ' stirred me up in curious ways. And in the spirit of the precocious boy Erasmus Leaf in the endearing film Dear Brigitte, who is infatuated with Brigitte Bardot and writes epistles of love, I wrote to Shabana and poured my heart out.

I never received so much as an autographed photograph from her, which left me broken-hearted, which pain was amplified years later when I learnt that she had married a poet named Javed Akhtar.

But one of the points I emphasised in my letter to Shabana, I recall, was that I would be perfectly happy to settle for a sherbet wedding ' a simple, no-frills wedding. This was as much a concession to my penurious state as to the fact that during the Emergency, which had been in force about that time, the government had introduced a Guest Control Order, which stipulated a ceiling on the number of guests who could be invited even to private ceremonial events like weddings.

It was a time of enforced socialist austerity, and everything was strictly rationed. And if you needed additional provisions or sugar or ghee to prepare sweetmeats for a wedding, you had to file an application in triplicate with the Civil Supplies Department. And since Indira Gandhi's minions ran a pretty efficient police state, civil supplies inspectors would turn up unannounced at weddings and ' I kid you not ' do a head-count of the number of visitors and levy a fine if they exceeded the ceiling. I remember my aunt was married in 1976, when the Emergency was in full force, and my siblings and I were put on sentry duty to sound early warning alerts in case we espied the inspectors coming. Needless to say, it took the joy out of the festive occasion for us.