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The Turkish couple Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu and Esra Polat,
still dressed in their traditional wedding clothes, seen behind the counter
serving meals to the Syrian refugees on their wedding day in August
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Did you read about the Turkish couple Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu
and Esra Polat who celebrated their wedding day with 4,000 Syrian refugees?
Their story had gone viral a couple of months ago.
Instead of having an exclusive and extravagant wedding in a
swanky hall, the young couple from the city of Kilis
in southern Turkey
decided to share their joy and a meal with the thousands of Syrian refugees displaced
by armed conflict as they tied the knot in August earlier this year.
They were assisted by a Turkish charity called Kimse Yok Mu
- KYM. A spokesman from KYM said Fethullah and Esra pooled the money they
received from family and friends for their wedding to pay for all the food. All
the members of the wedding reception pitched in to help serve the meals to
those in need from food trucks.
More than 4 million men, women, and children have left Syria since the civil war began in 2011, with
1.7 million refugees - half of which are children - living in Turkey , according to figures from
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHRC expects those
figures to continue to rise and the World Food Program is struggling to keep up.
It announced in July that it would have to cut refugee food rations because of
lack of funds.
The couple later said: “Seeing the happiness in the eyes of
the Syrian refugee children is just priceless. We started our journey to
happiness with making others happy and that’s a great feeling.”
What a great way of thinking and doing something meaningful
with a milestone event in your life. I had been totally touched by their
heart-warming story.
With the mad ‘wedding season’ upon us once more and the
annual frenzy just about beginning, I’ve been thinking about this beautiful
wedding story again and how great it would be if it can inspire us to do a
rethink on our own weddings.
Our weddings have nowadays turned into ostentatious and
meaningless affairs. Unnecessarily lavish and expensive, it has become all
about doing what others are doing or outdoing them, whether you can afford it
or not. I had talked a little about this in my earlier post The Cupcake. Neither memorable nor special in the
right sense, Naga weddings have morphed into show events aimed only at impressing
others……spectacles of the most ridiculous kind.
There was a great post in the Naga Blog some time ago
written by Atsung Imchen - The Naga Marriage Protocol.
He spoke about how we have practically killed off the real meaning of
weddings while also financially crippling families with unnecessary expenses. “Let
the wedding be a true celebration of two people coming together and not a
celebration of glamour, feast or who spends the most, Let it be a blessing not
a curse in disguise, let us celebrate the Real Wedding,” he had written.
If only more young Nagas would start thinking this way –
that a wedding is about celebrating a union, the start of a new chapter, with
loved ones and real friends, not about putting yourselves in crippling debt
organising an event for the entire town and the neighbouring town as well…….and
a couple of villages to boot. At least seventy-five to eighty percent of guests
at our weddings are people we hardly know or care about.
Besides the financial expenses of the wedding itself, there
is also the time and energy wasted for a single wedding. Such massive events take
days and a huge number of people to organise, and all these people have to put
most of their other work on hold just so the grand wedding can go according to
plan.
The irony is that, for all the money spent, our weddings
have become cheap and tasteless, almost grotesque. Instead of being the
meaningful occasion that it is supposed to be, which in turn fills all who
participate in it with a warm glow, it has become meaningless contests and garish
displays of pretence. What you can do, I can do better, seems to be the mindset
driving the Naga wedding trend. And it’s getting worse with every passing year.
If anyone should have the good sense to have a simple
intimate wedding with only the important people in their lives to witness and
bless them, the majority thinking among our people would be that they probably
couldn’t afford a ‘better’ one. Gossips would follow about what they didn’t do
or didn’t have, and funniest of all, there would be many hurt feelings over not
being invited.
Seriously, our guest list is among the first things that we
need to change. Why do we feel the need to invite the friend of a friend of a
friend that we barely know? Mere acquaintances, people we’ve met only once
maybe, virtual strangers……..all these make it into our invitation list.
Printing less than a thousand invitation cards has become something of a cardinal
sin. Having sent out so many invitations and with RSVPs out of the question in
our context, food has to be prepared for thousands of people who may or may not
turn up. Such needless wasteful excessiveness!
I’m not suggesting that we should forego all celebrations and
hold only backyard weddings with rice and chutney or spend the day feeding the
needy like the Turkish couple. Certainly, everyone deserves a special wedding
day, but special does not mean showy extravagance, over the top expenses and outdoing
somebody else.
It’s about time we started remembering again the real reason
behind the celebration and the true meaning of the day – which is a ceremony
marking the union of two lives, a celebration of their love and the coming
together of two families. It is about making your commitment to one another with
loved ones and real friends as witness and sharing your happiness with people
who mean something to you.
It’s definitely not about putting on a ridiculous gaudy show
to impress others or competing to see who can spend more on their nuptials.