Surreal Cross-Culture Wedding With A Bride Who Wore Heirloom Jewels

"There’s a lot of pressure to have the perfect wedding. To have the perfect proposal, seamless planning process, have the picture-perfect family and friends surrounding you on the day of, have the perfect fiancé…" - penned, the bride

And how can we not agree? Every day we scroll through visually-pleasing wedding celebrations that boast of whimsical elements and heartwarming 'how we met' stories. But only a bride and groom know the hustle that goes behind planning one. Vrinda & Shyam's wedding plans were spoiled due to the pandemic, only to be postponed for a year.

But when she walked down the blooming aisle in a breathtaking hand-crafted ombré peach lehenga, it looked no less than a predestined fairytale. She wore exquisite gold necklaces, one that her Nani (and later her mother) had worn for their weddings and the other that her Dadi wore at her own wedding. Also, Shyam beautifully complemented her in an ivory sherwani with a matching stole. So, go ahead and witness this scene-stealing union!

Meet Vrinda & Shyam

I got engaged in the midst of the COVID pandemic in 2020. My now-husband, Shyam, and I hoped to get married in 2021. COVID had different plans for us and we decided 2022 would have to be the year. In the meantime, Shyam was finishing his MBA at MIT Sloan (class of 2021), and I was still living in San Francisco. Our year of long distance came to an end thanks to my fortuitous admission to my dream MBA program at Harvard Business School! I moved myself across the country to Boston in August 2020, and was reunited with Shyam!

Mehndi

Wedding

Reception

From The Bride

We had a big fat Indian wedding with a mixture of North Indian, South Indian, and American wedding traditions, attended by over 300 guests from all over the world! After several events leading up to the big day (a henna party and other family gatherings) Shyam and I got married at a beautiful winery - Wolfe Heights Winery - in Sacramento. We had a traditional Hindu wedding (with a mixture of North and South Indian rituals, to represent both my and Shyam's backgrounds), followed by dinner (made by a special chef who used to cook for royals in Jaipur, India!), vibrant dance performances, and an unforgettable sparkler send-off. The next day, we had a glamorous wedding reception at the Sacramento Convention Center, full of touching speeches, wedding party dances (including a choreographed Bollywood dance that Shyam & I performed), toasts (and some roasts…), a lavish dinner, and some decadent desserts!

There’s a lot of pressure to have the perfect wedding. To have the perfect proposal, seamless planning process, have the picture-perfect family and friends surrounding you on the day of, have the perfect fiancé… the list goes on!

As a recent bride who was brimming with happiness and excitement on her wedding day, I’m here to tell you that it does not have to be perfect in order to be incredible. Over the course of the 2 years of my MBA, I learned more than I thought I could (both about business principles and about life). I prioritized meeting new people and building strong friendships. Shyam and I went through ups and downs together (a close family member of mine was very sick and I was helping take care of the family) while being full-time students, wedding planning, and job recruiting in the midst of a global pandemic. My family member’s health took a drastic turn for the worse and the spring of 2021 was ripe with family emergencies. Shyam and I flew back to California in 2021 to support the family during the emergency and separately lost my grandmother and my uncle to COVID all within a 6-week span after returning to California. Life felt so difficult that I considered dropping out of HBS to focus on my family. It was incredibly difficult to sit in hours of class and several more hours of daily schoolwork while supporting my family during the emergency. Shyam pushed me to keep going and finish my MBA (spoiler: I graduated with my MBA 1 week before getting married! As my bridesmaids' joke, an MBA and an MRS degree in 1 week). He supported me and my family endlessly, flying from Boston to California on red eyes for weekends even when he started his demanding full-time job. Through all of this, we pushed to keep planning our wedding too. Some days during the second year of my MBA, I would wake up at 6 AM, finish my schoolwork for 2-3 hours, rush to campus, attend classes from 9 AM-5 PM, attend 2-3 full-time job interviews, call my family to make sure everything was alright, get home at 9 PM, scarf down some dinner Shyam had prepared, hop on a 9-11 PM zoom call with our wedding planner, and knock off wedding planning items from 11PM-midnight. As it got closer to our wedding, this trifecta of a full-time demanding MBA program, planning a 4-day long 300-person wedding, job recruitment into a notoriously tough field, and supporting the family, persisted. A few months before the wedding, we learned that some of our closest family members would not be able to attend our wedding because they lived in India and could not get visas. We were heartbroken. We considered pushing our wedding out another year even but decided to have future small family celebrations in India when we could travel there next.

It was a tough 2-year long journey in many ways. While a global pandemic was raging on, it felt like the least of the problems I had to tackle. Shyam and my parents’ love, support, patience, and tireless work made our wedding week imperfectly perfect. Did we have the wedding a year after the proposal as we had planned? No. Did we have all of our family and friends at our wedding? No. Was it a seamless, dreamy planning process? No. But did we count the blessings we had around us during the wedding day? Yes! And are we still floating on cloud 9 because of all of the love and beauty we were surrounded by on our wedding day? Absolutely yes. It doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be incredible. In fact, imperfect perfection is even sweeter!

Vendors: Venue - Wolfe Heights Winery, Sacramento, CA (Wedding), Sacramento SAFE Convention Center (Reception) ; Wedding Photography - Usman Baporia ; Planner - Amrit Dhillon Bains, Anais Event ; Flowers - Edgar Martinez of Flowers by Edgar ; Chef - Arvind Bhargava