You might be wondering about the title of this post and probably thought I meant the opposite. I am referring to the state of affairs as evidenced by my recent experience.
Yesterday, I had been to the Chennai Trade Centre for “The Grand Wedding Show 2011”. It was neither ‘Grand’ nor was it anyway connected to ‘Wedding show’. Going by the Parthiban-Vadivelu popular comedy about a notice board outside a fish shop, this event should have been billed as ‘The … 2011’ or simply left blank. Allow me to explain.
The tagline for this event was ‘Chennai’s largest wedding exhibition’ and we thought it would be a great opportunity to meet key players of the wedding space like the halls, contractors, caterers, gifts, artists etc. And what did we see?
Car makers like Toyota and Honda with their latest(??) offerings, real estate companies like VGN, Akshaya homes, TVI hogging the bulk of the space with their large stalls. The only connection i could see for these flat promoters to this event was the famous tamil saying “veetai katti paar, kalyanathai panni paar’ or “Build a house and get your daughter married”. I was unable to fathom any linkage between the cars and the marriage except as a possible gift from the in-laws to the groom!! Then there were the holiday resorts not talking about honeymoons but generally and so was yatra. There were some strange players whose connection to marriage I could not fathom like Businessline newspaper and LIC.
The caterers were conspicuously absent except for one and even that was talking about catering for all and sundry events including marriages. There was just one hotel offering its banquet halls for marriages.
The only relevant players were Bharat Matrimony with their latest Matrimony Gifts offerings, a couple of wedding cards, a magazine for south indian weddings curiously named ‘mehendi’ (wouldn’t ‘marudhani’ been a better name?), a decor advertiser, an event manager and a few gift stalls.
And to think that I paid Rs.80 (for me and my wife) for entry and travelled all the way from t nagar to nandambakkam and back, just for this!!!
There was absolutely no empathy for the general public who were enticed with the promise of all wedding related partners under one roof. Clearly an inflated promise that was not delivered at all
Strands of thought 
Ramkumar said,
December 11, 2011 at 11:54 am
Man, you seem to have lots of spare time to attend to such stuff too!
badrirag said,
December 11, 2011 at 4:07 pm
This was a professional and business visit for self and Geetha as well. As you know, Geetha runs an aesthetic gift business @ http://www.shreelamps.com and marriages are an excellent occassion for return gifts. With Ever Green Melodies now up and running, I wanted to check out the marriage scenes and hence this visit.
Experiencing the power of Bhagawath Geetha « Strands of thought said,
December 12, 2011 at 4:01 am
[…] I wrote a post about my experiences in visiting a marriage show as a piece of pure self-expression and did the regular tweet and facebook link but thought […]
Subramanian said,
December 12, 2011 at 8:34 am
i attended a couple of other exhibitions at CTC Nanadambakkam and felt unsatisfied. Same feedback from friends and relatives. Guess it is the CTC management which maybe at fault.
badrirag said,
December 13, 2011 at 1:58 am
I dont think so because CTC mgmt is only the space provider and cannot possibly dictate who should participate. Except, perhaps make the space so expensive that the organizers bring anybody in who is willing to pay the unit charges. I can understand a theme like lifestyle where you see different kinds of vendors presenting their wares but not in a special thematic event like Weddings. Looks like the organizers of the wedding show did a better job of space selling than plan to please the visitors who were looking for all wedding related parties under one roof.