Inside India’s new wedding wonderland

From wine-reading stations to Interstellar sangeets, couples are reimagining their big day to make it personalised, immersive

- AKSHARA SRIVASTAVA

At a recent wedding, guests encountered an unexpected invitation: To look into their future, literally. Each person was asked to spill wine across a canvas.

The patterns created by the spills were then interpreted by a fortune-teller practising oenomancy, a form of divination that studies wine in the way tasseography reads tea leaves. What might have been a traditional cocktail hour instead became a moment of curiosity, conversation, and personalised insight, woven seamlessly into the couple's vision for a memorable day.

At another celebration, the sangeet was transformed into a cosmic experience inspired by Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fi epic. Guests walked through an entrance crafted to resemble the interior of a spaceship and stepped into a world filled with astronaut figurines, moon balls, and intergalactic flourishes. It was an immersive recreation of the film's speculative universe wherein a group of astronauts sets out to look for a new home for humankind.

These weddings are only two examples of how couples today are reshaping long-held ideas of grandeur and celebration. The pursuit is no longer only about scale but increasingly about distinction, about creating weddings that say something about the couple, their memories, their tastes, and even their sense of fun.

Over the decades, Indian weddings have continually expanded in scope and ambition, in part fuelled by the cinematic imagination of post-liberalisation Bollywood. Films such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) cemented the idea of multi-event festivities, choreographed functions, and exuberant decor. The visual vocabulary of weddings changed, and with it came a cultural shift: The idea that a celebration could, and should, be both elaborate and emotionally resonant.