Getting married is very stressful these days. Apart from the 48-hour wedding ceremonies and rituals, there’s the near-infinite shopping and preparations that go on for months together. And don’t even get me started on the cost of the whole exercise.

Even after all this pain, the whole marriage ceremony passes by like a blur. The only thing I remember about my wedding day is that I was hungry, very hungry, but the punditji wouldn’t let us eat lunch. He insisted on me saying something in a language I didn’t understand. I’m pretty sure that he was swearing at me in Sanskrit, but I can’t prove it.

Anyway, I think the world is now ready to see progress in the institution of marriage. And so, in the footsteps of the great social reformers of India like Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Rakhi Sawant, I’m proposing a radical reform to the ritual of the marriage!

Marriage 2.0 !
Marriage 2.0, as I call it, will incorporate the best of social networking and the internet age phenomenon, and by using real innovation, will also drive down costs!

The central part of the whole marriage ceremony will be a AJAX website created for your marriage. It will contain your photos and a feature will allow you to send an email to all your friends and relatives with the “e-wedding-invite” so that you don’t have to personally go to their houses and invite them.

The Marriage ceremony itself will be cut to 10 minutes, and will be web-cast live on the internet. There will even be a conference-call number for people to dial in if they want. This way, your friends and family can be a part of the ceremony without traveling. They are even free to keep their phones on mute and discuss yesterday’s cricket match without inviting stares from the punditji like in a real marriage!

Gifts & Presents
Gifts are the most important part of the marriage for the bride and groom. The website will contain a list of all the things that the bride and groom want, and people can register on the website and make donations towards the “Gift Fund” that will be used to buy stuff from the list. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Instead of getting 56 different types of wall-clocks, the bride and groom and get stuff that will help them with their married life (Like an XBOX for the groom and a life-time subscription to Cosmopolitan for the bride).

The website will also allow you to track how much money each of your friends and family have contributed, so that you’ll know how much to give when they get married.  This is the killer feature of the website. Everyone is going to LOVE this feature!

Eating and Dining
Eating is the most important part of the marriage for the guests that come to the wedding. This is where marriage 2.0 is taken to the next level. Instead of driving to a far-away marriage hall to eat the wedding food, guests will get to go to their own favorite restaurants and eat whatever they like - They can collect the bill and upload it to the website and get reimbursed for the dinner. This way, people can eat what they like and later tell the bride and groom how great the food was at their wedding.

Many of you are already thinking how to game this system - You say most people will go to a 5-star restaurant and order the most expensive butter naans. But I’ve thought of a solution to this problem too: There will be a limit to how much you can get reimbursed, and that limit depends on how much contribution you’ve made to the “Gift Fund” section of the website. This way, your guests have the incentive to make the maximum donation, so that they may get to eat at a good restaurant. Clever, no?

Gossip
Another important part of a wedding, I’ve been told, is the gossip about who wore what, and which saree was not going with which jewelry and what was looking gaudy on who. To enable this discussion, guests will be required to get dressed up in their fancy sarees/suits and upload the pictures to the website. These pictures will be available for everyone to view and comment. There will also be an online forum where guests can login, review the pictures of the other guests and then proceed to gossip.

This is obviously such a great plan, that I’m thinking of making it the default way people get married in Adityaism. Just think of the time and money that will be saved if everyone moved to Marriage 2.0! I think building this website for Marriage 2.0 will be a good plan for a startup company. Maybe I should quit my job and do this fulltime?

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