My Big Fat Guar Wedding
By GARDINER HARRIS
Keith Bedford for The New York
TimesA bridegroom rides a horse to the venue of his
wedding in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in this Oct. 25, 2009 file photo.The soaring price of guar has many of those involved in the desert bean’s farming, trading and processing already thinking about how to make planned weddings even bigger.
S.K. Sharma, managing director of Lutus Gums & Chemicals, expects that his son will marry next year and had planned to rent a venue costing 10,000 rupees, or about $180.
“Now I am in a position to take a venue of one lakh rupees,” or 10 times the originally planned cost, he said.
He said, thought that his new found wealth will not change the terms of the negotiations with his expected daughter-in-law’s family. Indeed, those negotiations are already well advanced, and more than 100 people from the two families recently met during an event for the bride and groom to get to know one another better.
“We have already seen the horoscope,” Mr. Sharma said, and the analysis was a propitious one.
Harish Deora, general manager of a Massey Ferguson franchise in Jodhpur, said that a doubling of his tractor sales in recent years will mean a similar expansion in the number of guests he must invite to the weddings of his two daughters.
“Whenever people come and buy something, they feel tied to me,” Mr. Deora explained. “So I have to invite them to my weddings.”
Once his daughters tie the knot, still some years away, he expects that he will have to invite at least 5,000 people for each ceremony, he said. If sales continue to expand, it will be even more, he said.
“I’ll spend 50 lakhs for just one wedding,” he said, or nearly $100,000 – far more than he is presently spending to build a house.
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