Wedding Tax

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Why can't there be strict laws on how much money people can spend on a wedding party? Sure, you can easily stick the different-folks-different-strokes logic in my face to debate this point, but seriously. The trouble is that these super-extravagant parties end up raising the bar for a society that is obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses. Social standing is a big deal anywhere, but infinitely more so among India's aspiring middle class. At a wedding party I attended recently, I was taken aback when I heard that the "per-plate" cost was Rs 4,000. It may not be a lot of money in US dollars but by Indian standards it is. To put things in perspective, India's per capita income is merely Rs. 7000 per month. This craze for big fat weddings is rampant in the northern states, with Delhi and Punjab easily leading the pack. What used to be agricultural fields before, have now been converted into party venues known as "marriage palaces" (or party plots in Gujarat). The wheat fields have now been replaced by sprawling lawns that can easily hold thousands of people at a time. On the outskirts of any big city, you'll find a long chain of marriage palaces, usually flanking a freeway on either side. They all have the same garish and over-the-top look when it comes to the decorations and menus.

Indian weddings can be delightfully vibrant affairs, but this crass commercialization has relegated weddings to an assembly-line product. Nothing distinctive. No personal touches. Traditional Indian hospitality dictated that the hosts (the bride's family) eat only after the bridegroom's party has been served. These days no one waits for anyone; it's hard to tell who's the host and who's a guest. Wedding crashers will have a field day in India! And what really gets my goat is the colossal amounts of waste and garbage such "carnivals" generate.  

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying this, but I wonder if the Indian government can come up with some sort of a Wedding Tax? Just like income is taxed in slabs, we could have several guest slabs: For example, no wedding tax if the guest count is less than 150 guests; 30% tax if the guest count exceeds 500, and so on. Once people realize that a long guest list will cost them more in taxes, they just might start having smaller (read less costly) weddings. Until monetary brakes are applied, this wedding juggernaut cannot be reigned in. 




  

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