Pandemic Wedding: A ‘Blessing in Disguise’ for Jaipur’s Ayesha & Angad

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A small, intimate and relaxed wedding in your home with your closest family members and friends. Doesn’t it sound like the kind of wedding we always dreamed of having? Let’s be honest, the famed ‘Big Fat Indian Weddings’ are more of a social obligation that we/our parents have to fulfill simply because we were invited for a certain number of weddings by a certain number of people. It’s a vicious cycle that seldom breaks.

Micro-weddings are the new cool
The Pandemic, among many other things, has forced us to break this practice and paved the way for minimalistic micro-weddings. Having said that, it is important to realize that a Pandemic wedding comes with its own set of challenges that require extreme tact, care and caution. From obtaining permissions, maintaining hygiene and social distancing to downsizing the guest list, the hurdles are many.

Co-founder of the Jaipur based Café Quaint, Ayesha Sajjan recently tied the knot with Angad Dev Singh. The couple got engaged in March and had planned a winter wedding in November. However, looking at the grim state of affairs owing to the pandemic, they decided to pre-pone their wedding to July.

The young and dynamic bride, Ayesha calls her Covid Wedding a ‘Blessing in Disguise’. “The wedding took place with the closest of friends and family. We had a ball and celebrated with people who genuinely care. Both Sikh and Rajput customs were carried out in the wedding and I enjoyed each one of them. I also got to spend quality time with my family and friends”, shares Ayesha.

Pro Tip: To cut down on your wedding guest list, prioritize the guests using categories like close family, friends followed by distant relatives and friends of siblings, etc. You can make the guests you can’t invite a part of your wedding by sending a box of sweets/chocolates after the wedding and thanking them for their blessings.

Dealing with Logistical Obstacles
To minimize the risk of getting infected, all pre-wedding functions like Haldi, Sangeet and Mehendi, were held at her maiden home in Adarsh Nagar with her family and friends doing their bit to organise everything smoothly. The wedding ceremony took place in a Gurudwara. Talking about logistical challenges the bride says, “There were challenges like the evening curfew, extensive paperwork for the Gurudwara wedding, getting sanction for the number of guests and their names etc. Luckily, I had already finished shopping for my wedding in March.”

Mas(k)ureade Wedding

Listing some useful tips to maintain hygiene and safety during the wedding, she added, “Work with trusted vendors for décor and food and make sure you are personally involved with what’s happening. I am a germaphobe and I used to oversee the sanitization of the house myself. Wearing masks at all times was obvious. A list of the guests with temperatures was recorded daily and no one entered the premises without a mask or sanitizing their hands. Ample disposable masks and sanitizing stands were kept at the entrances.”

“The whole wedding had a very relaxed, at ease and chill vibe to it. Something I had always dreamed of when envisioning my wedding” she was quoted saying.

It indeed took many of us a pandemic to realize that weddings can happen with just 50 people too! It is rightly said, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’.