Year of Weddings

The boys are getting married. So am I. The year started off with Sagar's wedding in January. Konman is getting married day after tomorrow. Mine's on Aug 20th and Gautham's is on Jan 24th 2027. 

Our bachelorhood started somewhere around 2017-18. Now 8-9 years later, we can finally fill forms differently. 

I don't mean the energy of this write up to be "Every boy fantasizes about his fairy tale wedding". But, apologies if it comes across like that.

I used to have this weird feeling about married life when I was a teen. Might be such a cliche thing to say; given my teen brain was as magnificently dumb as anyone else's if not more.. I wasn't quite able to understand the mentality. How people accepted to dial down their lives and let themselves be domesticated like that.

Somewhere down my late 20s, I met and befriended a lot of married people. Also what I made of my married friends like Apita and James, Vivi and Junjulan, or Ithaf and Firozka, Kon-Anakha and Khan-Jeeha who are practically married couples, and most importantly, my own fiance made me think different. I guess I also started looking at my grandparents differently. For the first time, I started observing how beautiful their marriage is. Also the TV shows I watched - The Office, After life, and a few others (that don't really matter) - gave me a different perspective on relationships and life in general.

The office in particular perhaps - I'm not sure how many times I've seen that show. It got to a point where now I have actually developed a tick - whenever I hear/see/say something the first impulses that my neurons fire right afterwards are lines from the show.

Which brings me to Guten Pranks. My oldest friend has asked me to speak at his wedding. I replied with a sticker. He said he's serious and I replied that I'm on page 2. I am - in my head. But in a more real sense, I had no idea what to write. Where do I begin? I don't have any interesting stories of us that I can say infront of family. Perhaps I can start with 'he's been a racist, sexist, homophobic insecure p*ssy that outgrew every single one of those personas and became the gayest for Ruthuvyali just around the time that he's getting married.' 

Or I could go with how he has actually been one of the nicest kids, one of the coolest friends and one of the most beautifully spirited guys I know. He never threw any tantrums - been a nice son to the family, been a chill dude to hangout with and a guy with a very low no-nonsense approach to friendships and drama - that was more my thing, really.

Choosing neither of this would solve my problem. The thing is for me to say this with authenticity, recite our lives with justice in front of a dearly beloved crowd would require me to give context. I have to set the stage and expand my speech for the gully cricket team, classmates, crushes, school teachers, residents of the streets we commuted after school, parents, grandmas, uncles, cousins, neighbours and Visakh. 

Perhaps it's my inability to say a simple story without complicating it. Nevertheless, I'm now left with the ultimate responsibility of giving the best man speech. 

I've never done this. and I'm possibly never going to do this again. Here's what I'm telling myself. It doesn't have to be a killer, let it be awkward, let it be embarrassing even if you can make it- but remember it's a sin to make it lame. 

I've promised myself to try to make him cry.