As per a report published by KPMG, India’s current wedding market is estimated at $50 billion, accompanied by a rapid annual growth rate. Thereby, making it one of the biggest contributors to the travel and hospitality industries.
Since times immemorial, when a wedding was scheduled to take place, the entire village would come together, lend a helping hand and ensure all preparations were nothing short of perfect.
Today’s millennial couples take the onus of organising, planning and budgeting for their own wedding, as opposed to families being the key decision makers previously.
At its core, the wedding industry is driven by cultures, traditions, and the union of 2 families.
From traditional weddings to destination and theme based wedding with the hoopla of social media, weddings in India have evolved over time.
From a simple wedding that might cost INR 10Lakh for a middle class Indian family to a destination wedding that might cost in crores, families and couples spend huge energy on getting the perfect wedding.
Panning starts the day wedding date is finalised and reaches a crescendo in terms of preparation and the stress involved as it gets closer to the D-day.
Getting the perfect dress to the perfect venue/destination, the perfect gifts and planning the itineraries for the guest keeping in mind the sensitivities of each relationship, families and couples stress themselves out over each details.
The big fat Indian wedding is a popular phenomenon around the world but the amount of effort that goes behind it is unimaginable.
What’s next?
Whether it’s a simple wedding or a complex big fat one, real life starts the day the wedding gets over.
Whichever way someone married, in a court or in a temple, at home or at a destination means nothing to what the life would be once they are married.
A marriage is at the end of the day a relationship and it requires all the hard work that a relationship requires to make it work.
Understanding each other, the families, the friends.
Understanding how each individual likes to live when the façade of the wedding planning is over and real life starts.
What are their preferences, what are your preferences?
Kind of things one wants to do, how will you react when the partner doesn’t want what you want.
Yes, that’s true lot of hard work.
It’s probably 100 of times more work than you put in planning the wedding.
The astonishing fact is that divorce rates have doubled in India over the last 2 decades.
Not a statistic that we can be proud of.
However, the millennial, YOLO generation doesn’t believe in living with pain.
They believe in surgery.
More time Planning the wedding than the marriage
Wedding is the event while marriage is life.
If people would spend as much time (as a proportion) as they spend in planning a wedding in planning the marriage, it would not perhaps end in unhappiness.
Life is not as simple as deleting an app or unsubscribing a streaming service.
It requires effort.
This is perhaps true for every aspect of life.
You can either sleep walk through life or make an effort to excel at it.
The difference between excellence and just being there is starkly visible to us all around.
When people question success and why so few people are successful, they think about luck, timing, privilege but forget about the hard work that goes into it.
This exactly is what you require in investing.
Got money, start investing.
Simple-not really.
Getting started needs understanding, your objectives, goals, risk, your reacting to risk and the exit plan.
What would keep you awake and how to reduce that stress.
What do you pay for and what do you do yourself?
These are questions that are about discovering yourself as much as understanding where and how you want to invest.
And just like a marriage can’t be successful without putting in the work, so can’t investing.
The bad news, everything is work.
Good news, its’ worth putting in the work or paying for it.
Happy Reading
Irreverentinvestor.com 