Wedding day woes
Is it time to regulate wedding service providers?

"I love being married," said Rita Rudner. "It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life."

Picture a typical Asian wedding day. The guests arrive, all resplendent in their attire, the relatives meet and greet goofily, and family hug each other randomly. Imagine now if you will, for a moment, the most glorious day of your life, your wedding day, ruined by the ineptitude of the caterers.

Last weekend a friend of mine reported back to me the happenings at her sister in laws wedding. As chance would have it, I happened to miss out – a blessing in disguise and a very lucky escape.

A huge number of guests suffered from food poisoning after partaking of the succulent food that was served up. The victims included an army load of staff from a local school. It was meant to be kept hush, but a mate (another victim) who works there phoned me to tell all during their routine twenty minute sojourn to the John.

Not content with putting a massive cloud over the couple’s special day, the service providers, who had also decided to boost profits by providing the catering, have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their failure of responsibility. Thus far the demands for compensation from the paying party have been largely ignored.

Modern day weddings arrangements are no laughing matter. Not content with a date ceremony at the Mosque, a simple celebrity style sunny beach wedding, a private reception or a big family do at the local secondary school, couples are vying with the Jones to have the biggest, best and most lavish wedding day ever. When Amy Winehouse got married to Blake Fielder - Civil in secret and treated her family to a motorway curry house wedding party, Mother in laws and their brides united in their condemnation at the sheer cheek of these “tight wads.” Asians, don’t do private weddings; it’s not a wedding unless every uncle you ever met or heard of hasn’t been invited in person.

The new generation of Asians don’t have or share the burden of sending money back home. In many cases both husband and wife are earning well and there is surplus money. It is precisely because of this that new to wed couples are able to break the bank and spend record figures on lavish weddings.

This brings me to my next point; in light of the expenses involved, shouldn’t there be some form of insurance offered to the paying parties? Also, who regulates these wedding providers? Do they have a guild or managing representative body? They also insist on money upfront, and it is easy to see why. It’s vital for a review of these services, their services, tariffs and quality. These steps are necessary, and if ignored we may well end up with a Channel S feature on another community fraud. We could end up with a situation where one of the most important days of a certain individuals life can be ruined because of a wedding service provider pocketing a huge amount of revenue and taking flight.

So before Comrade George Galloway steps in to bring such a scandal to the attention of our government the community could do a lot worse than to call for the authorities and leaders/activists to work together to police these services - after all marriage is the chief cause of divorce.

Not wishing to end on a depressing note I would like to offer my heartiest wishes to anyone getting married this weekend.