Rock N’ Rollin or Unreal…or both?!

I have been saving this engagement for so many months, it is ridiculous. I am building my photography portfolio/website/blog and wanted this to be the first thing I blogged about but really…I am so lazy and this was so cool that I couldn’t wait any longer. PLUS Avani totally fits the category of the Unreal Bride so this makes complete sense

While waiting to build my online portfolio (or for it to build it self!) I also knew I wanted to submit this to one blog-Rock N’ Roll Bride.This is the one blog which when we started the Unreal Bride was our first stop  every morning . Seriously. I used to wonder if it was ever possible to be featured on that blog. But guess what, anything is possible! To be honest, I was scared I would send Kat the submission and she would be like ‘NO!!!’ .I mean from whatever I have seen/read about her-its always good stuff but you know how you think everything will go wrong with you and how people will hate you-well that is what I thought!So I was scared. Stupidly so!! because Kat is as cool as her pink hair! 

I may seem like I am playing it all cool and all that but I am SO not. I am bouncing off  the walls-this is a huge honour to have my photos up on the Rock N’ Roll Bride and I am so glad that it’s these two who have been featured on it.You know those connections I keep going on about ? Well Avani is one of those connections so she is extra special  ❤. I would call them the Poet and the Artist if I could and not the Barber and the Architect.

For the time being, I will just call them Avani and Yashwin.

I hand you over to Avani now-the poet;

So Yach and i have been together for over six and a half years now.
Both Cancerians. Both demented. (uhmm….who is she calling demented?! I only see two hotties!)

. . . and there we were, on our way to the cinema, driving to catch Tangled on Christmas day,
and he turns to me and goes “Let’s get married!” and I’m like “Yeah, Why the hell not”. Just like that.

We chose June 1st cause that’s the day my parents got married 25 years ago. It seemed right, you know.

What followed were a blurry five months. All for a massive party- to celebrate my parents silver anniversary and a coming-out-to-the-world-of-sorts for Y and I.

 Retracing the steps to that glorious day-

the before.

I was on a happy high. Literally feeling like a pumpkin,
swirling merrily to jazz, making mental notes, riding on perpetual elation.

The dress:

As I paraded around the studio

in my funny patchwork garb,

Yach called me a magician, see the love in that statement?

Two odd elves getting each other’s oddities and such.

The shoes:

I fell in lust the minute I saw them.

Cause I don’t usually wear anything but Mary janes or flipflops not because I don’t like sexy shoes but because I fall, a LOT.(She lies not, I have photographic evidence of when she tripped a *few* times but I know how she feels(since I fall a lot too!) so let’s not go there! 

I wanted to build a glass showcase for my molten gold bling heels

 cause they are a piece of art, that should be periodically ogled at and maybe worshiped.

The hair:

My hair’s short so I decided to wax it some and pretty it by adding these two lovely brooches my mum- in -law sent me.

The barber in me was beaming.

The jewelry:

I was going to wear my mother’s earrings, old school prettiness.

and bangles cause I love bangles, obsessively.

The cake:

Shrek cake? or the cake that looked like Mad Hatter’s hat?

We went with the hat- wild purple and sugarpaste and pink scallops and fondant.

I wanted them stripes, polkas, squiggly candy frostings in orange and fuschia

totally reflecting the strange in us.

The rings:

So, sadly there was nothing that was passed on for generations in Y’s family, something that was charmingly reeking of age- old tradition cause I am a sentimental fool like that.

I wanted something that was very me. Not a huge baubles person but this was special.

So we chose a funny little solitaire wrapped around a vine like engraving, holding the diamond like the mouth of a tulip.

and Y chose a simple band with three diamonds carved and held flat and he got both the rings set in rose gold.

And we saw them, the symbolic bands,

they burned it in copper,

they etched it in gold,

our names ~ our lives ~ our love.

Flying furniture, boomerang thoughts, bubbling baubles and ever increasing good kind of anxiety as the day loomed closer.

We got temple engaged two days before the big party.

Rose petals and wire circlets.

Sacred rites through a gold door.

The day he put a ring on it:

I saw only the blue in the sky that day

only the bright, only the serene,

held my dreams to my chest, dearly,

held my love in quiet possession.

The after:

Blessed and blissed out.

The gold fish scaled shoes killed it, for real, like they killed my feet.

The hem of my skirt was all wildflowers as i danced in delirium.

O,f strangers and kindness

of fairy lights and carriage dreams,

of a blinding, all consuming sort of love.

~ the stars sometimes align and the moon sings ~

And having Kismet there was just beyond awesome.

She captured the day just exactly as it was.

The frantic frills and  getting ready and the road to the party place. All of it.
All the randomness, all the gorgeous candids and all the details, the tiniest ones didn’t escape her.

All my beloved, humans and cat babies.

Thank you love for giving us the most beautiful of all gifts – lasting picture memories <3

Photographer:Kismet Jewell Nakai

Outfit: Masaba and Missoni

Shoes: Trés Mode

Location: Mumbai

The song that played on repeat the whole time we were at the house . I never remember the name but I will never forget the tune.

Real Wedding N&A Part III

What do we have in store for you this Friday? The final installment from the N&A wedding. If you have missed the earlier posts , here is Part I and Part II.

Since the wedding ceremony was at ten am, the day started bright and early .Despite the late night and long looong day the bride had had, she was shining and radiant as ever! The bride kept her make-up very natural and simple, and the painted design of red and white dots right above her eyebrows was a great addition!

 

Before the bride took off to the gurudwara for the ceremony, I managed to get some shots of her outside where in the natural light, the colour of her outfit really looked great. She wore a lehenga by Ritu Kumar who is known for her contribution to the haute couture fashion of India bridal wear.On a side note, I am a pretty big fan of the Ritu Kumar ad campaigns especially when they have Prabuddhadas Gupta as their photographer!

The wedding was in a gurudwara where the groom arrived in full force with lots of music and dancing and ofcourse, a horse The ceremony was short and sweet and after, the entire wedding party proceeded back to the fabulous farm to celebrate.

Real Wedding N&A Part II

I wasn’t meant to make you wait so long for the second part of this real wedding , but things got pretty hectic and before I knew it, I was in the middle of Kenya with no internet access. It was brilliant to be disconnected from phones and the internet but after a while, it got a bit suffocating. I just wanted to quickly check my mail, or tweet for a minute .Anything!! I just needed my internet fix! So here I am, back from the beautiful wilderness and the first thing I am doing is posting part two of N&A’s wedding. Much much delayed but I know you guys will love it!

I don’t think I mentioned it earlier but this wedding was in Delhi, which is torturously hot during the summer but in the winter, it is absolutely lovely. The days are almost always bright and sunny – perfect for a wedding out in the open. The brilliant blue skies and bright sunny days are synonymous with weddings- every one takes advantage of the weather!

The engagement ceremony and mehendi happened on the same day which meant primarily two things- one, the bride changed from one gorgeous outfit to another and two, I took billions of photos! It was hard choosing just a few to share with you but I did the best I could though I wish I could show you all!

Like always, words don’t say as much as the photographs do so let’s take a look at some of the engagement photographs.

Navdeep, the gorgeous bride, waited patiently for the groom to arrive ,she had been ready since 7 am! !Who says that it’s the women who take longer to get dressed??!

No wedding is quite the same without the bride’s friends by her side making sure she’s doing alright (and isn’t going hungry) during all the madness.

After the engagement ceremony, the bride disappeared only to reappear wearing yet another gorgeous outfit- probably my favourite out of the two! Both the outfits were by designer Mallika Mathur who doesn’t seem to have a website but you can read a little about her here.

{ Real Wedding } N&A Part I

You might think this is a picture of jalebis – those yummy sugary deep fried treats that taste so perfect with a cup of tea or on a rainy day. But I am going to allow my imagination to run wild. To me it is some ancient script which all the priests read from in their sing song nasal voices . It could very well be that because I never ever got a word of what those priests are saying anyway! But, that’s just me and yes, those ARE jalebis. I would eat them all the time if they weren’t so sweet and oily and uhmm, dare I say it, unhealthy! The only time I would sneak one would be at a wedding which is exactly where I took this picture.

This wedding should’ve been posted a few months ago but since my favourite thing to do is to not do, it has taken me 4 months to post it. To be honest, I didn’t know where to start with this wedding, the decor, the clothes, the bride or the ceremony?! That’s the thing with Indian weddings- they are so intricate and carry on for a couple of days so you come away with so many photographs and I want to share them all but that isn’t possible, right?

After mulling over it,I finally decided I will show you some of the decor – and tease you before I show you the bride and groom! There were two days of celebration and they took place in the bride’s gorgeous farm house

 

The mehendi ceremony happened under a beautiful canopy decorated by pink and green cloth , strings of flowers and kaleeras hanging off the roof like little chandeliers!

Fuchsia pink and bright green(I am not great with colour names so if I have got them wrong-go ahead and correct me!) were the colours of the day and right from the tent to the chairs to the cushions were all draped in these colours. Though these are super bright colours and you could go quite wrong with them, they were in just right the doses and on that bright wintery morning, nothing would’ve looked better! I loved how they used the marigold flowers – very unusual and it was the first time I have seen them being used like this.

Can you spot the bride getting her mehendi done? She moved to the main tent area to be closer to the rest of the party.

Reel Wedding: Neha on NDTV

Via Design Sponge

We love LOVE Bombay (some say Mumbai!) so when we got to go over there to do a photo shoot earlier this month-the excitement in the unreal office was hard to hide! You will have to try and understand all the layers of excitement to actually feel what we were feeling! The trip meant- an exciting photo shoot (obviously), the Unreal Bride’s first work trip, national television, great advertising, meeting my favourite six month old, hanging with the family and of course, getting a whiff of the city’s lovely fishy air!

We quickly finished off a project we were working on (more on that later!), realising suddenly we  had less than a day to get everything together. In a mad rush, we packed all the props and ideas we would need for the shoot , made a list of what we wanted to do (we surprise ourselves with how organised we can be if we want to) and before we knew it, we were on a flight to Bombay.

As most of you already know, the bridal shoot we did got featured on Valley & Co’s blog a week or so ago which just added to all the excitement that has been synonymous with this whole experience! Got to love Aleah and Nick for featuring us- thanks again guys We have some more photos to show you here in addition to the ones that have been featured on their blog,so don’t go away thinking you have already seen all of them before!!!! I am stealing some of the text from that post though – just so you get an idea of the day we spent on the sets of the show.

What show , you ask? Band Baaja Bride.

A fairly popular show here in India. We only discovered how popular it was when April got asked by a random Aunty in Delhi if she had been on TV. Yes, our five minutes of stardom have definitely paid off !

If you have read the post on Valley&Co’s blog then you have read all the italicised bit before, but if you haven’t then you can read all about it here!

This is what happened- there is a show ‘Band Baaja Bride’ (that translates loosely to the fan fare and music that is associated with all Indian Weddings) that runs on one of the better-known channels here in India. It’s a make-over show for a bride who wants to look extra glam on their wedding day. The girls send in their entries, if they get chosen – the channel dresses them up in the prettiest designer lehengas, spoils them silly with all sorts of spa sessions and things, with expert make up artists – basically the works! And then follows them through their wedding day in all their fabulousness. Reality TV comes to weddings, in a nutshell!

This particular bride was getting married in the US and wanted some help with DIY tips for make up and how to deal with all the stress since she wouldn’t have a lot of help there. The Band Baaja Bride team decided to help her out- give her her outfit, have a make up artist show her some easy make up tips and hair styles which she would be able to do on her own.

Since they wouldn’t be able to be their on her wedding day, they wanted her to give her something ‘special’ and that’s where we came in. They called us asking if we would like to do a photo shoot with her and that’s the part where we started this post off- many levels of excitement etc etc.