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UNITED STATES, April 6, 2012 (NY Times by Shivani Vora): When I got married almost 10 years ago, it was my parents and I who orchestrated the week-long affair, a “medium-sized” Indian affair spread over various venues in Manhattan and New Jersey, involving more than 450 guests from as a far away as Hong Kong, New Delhi and Germany.

The year of tension-filled planning it took to put it together was punctuated with heated arguments and littered with to-do lists that never seemed to get finished. I tried reaching out to several well-known Manhattan wedding planners located in the Upper East Side, Chelsea and the West Village for help and quickly realized that I was better off on my own.

Luckily, Indian brides and grooms will fare much better today if they need professional help — in the past several years, a cottage industry of wedding planners specializing in Indian affairs has sprung up around the country. Some are freelance planners working out of their homes, others are full-blown companies with multiple staff. Some are not even Indian, others, such as the Washington D.C.-based Working Brides, plan Western and South Asian weddings but usually have an Indian planner handling the Indian side.

The weddings of one planner, Sonal J. Shah Event Consultants, tend to be lavish, and several run easily into the seven figures. Last year, for instance, she planned a seven-day extravaganza in New York City that cost more than $2 million, the wedding of two professionals, one the daughter of a doctor. Highlights included a welcome reception at Indian-fusion restaurant Vermilion, a mehndi (henna ceremony) and sangeet (a pre-wedding dinner with music and dancing) at Chelsea Piers, the ceremony at Broad Street Ballroom and the reception at Cipriani Downtown where the decor alone was $650,000 and 30 eight-foot tall centerpieces were suspended from the ceiling.