{"id":11069,"date":"2012-06-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/06\/01\/hindu-wedding-planners-thrive-in-the-united-states\/"},"modified":"2012-06-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T12:00:00","slug":"hindu-wedding-planners-thrive-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/06\/01\/hindu-wedding-planners-thrive-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu Wedding Planners Thrive In The United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source UNITED STATES, April 6, 2012 (NY Times by Shivani Vora): When I got married almost 10 years ago, it,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}