SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, March 16, 2006: After spending a couple of decades living and working here, rising to president of one company and then owner of a management consultant business, Vinod Kumar has combined a lifetime passion with the desire to teach about his culture and religion. The result: “Deypika’s Wedding,” a 46-minute documentary that follows a bride and bridegroom through a traditional Indian-Hindu ceremony in San Diego. The film made its debut last week in a fourth floor room at San Diego Mesa College as part of Women’s History Month in conjunction with the school’s humanities institute (Kumar’s wife, Meera Kumar, teaches English at Mesa College). “Someone has to take the initiative to take the culture and the religion to the West in a manner that people can understand,” said Kumar.
Kumar said the debate over public school textbooks reinforces the need for more awareness, even if it’s from a homemade film, about the world’s oldest and third-largest religion. The idea for this documentary came to him as soon as he heard about the couple’s plans for a traditional wedding. “I understand the Western culture very well and I understand the Indian culture very well,” he said. “So I asked myself, ‘Why don’t I try to use my creative ideas and skills to put some interesting stuff together?'” Outfitted with a camcorder, he shot footage over a week’s time in September, 2004, following Deypika Singh, the bride, and Vish Iyer, the bridegroom through the elaborate ceremonies and rituals. Over the next several months, he followed with on-camera interviews with the couple, who help narrate the film. While he audience is told the Sanskrit names for each ceremony, Kumar said he tried to keep the explanations as simple as possible. “We had to really cut it down to sound bites that people could understand in the West,” he said. He stresses that this is about one wedding and isn’t meant to represent all Indian weddings. “No two Indian weddings I’ve ever seen are identical,” he added.