One of my all time favourite reads? The “Weddings & Celebrations” section of the New York Times. I began reading it in 1991 when as a freshman at Smith, I took an Anthropology class and needed to write a paper on the language of ritual and its part in defining culture. The paper and the class have long been forgotten but I got hooked to the column.
I missed it when I was back in India in the pre-Internet years but in the last four years, I’ve been a regular visitor to the page on the New York Times website. In terms of width and range of experience, the couples featured here are hard to beat. The celebrated composer Zubin Mehta has been in it twice, one when his ex-wife remarried his brother, and then again when he married his current wife Nancy. Frequently, there are Indian couples, many who appear to be characters out of a Jhumpa Lahiri short story, who share their stories of finding love and the journey to the altar. One of my favourites, the 30 something lawyer from Chicago who avoided blind dates until her friends tricked her into one. She was stood up by the original blind date but ended up having coffee with a young Indian PR executive who had finished up a meeting in the same restaurant and the rest, as they told the Times, is history.
Today, there were two great stories: The two gay men from California rushing to wed before Proposition 8 goes to vote, and at their wedding, their twin daughters, born via a surrogate. There is a fabulous family photograph, a happy gathering of folks against a backdrop of lush green fauna and the two proud grooms, each holding a baby. I almost exited the site when I caught sight of the next story: two gay men in a double wedding with, wait for it, the father of one of the grooms and his partner.
The celebration of love and the belief in commitment doesn’t get more universal than this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment