Chris & Sandy’s Bollywood Inspired Wedding {New York}

Hello again lovely readers! We are so excited to show you this gorgeous wedding full of elegance and timeless charm. Chris and Sandy celebrated with their nearest and dearest, inspired by the glamour of Bollywood. Want to see more? Keep scrolling!

We talked to bride Sandy about her beautiful wedding.

Tell us about the wedding

From the moment we had our first date, we both knew this was it. From then, it was a whirlwind of events leading up to our big day. Festivities had started on August 30th, 2013 when I had my Haldi ceremony and a grand Sangeet with tons of performances by family and friends. Being a singer myself, I decided to surprise family and perform in a different way, doing a Bollywood dance number to end the night. The night itself was vibrant with a pink and purple Indian/Moroccan themed stage where all of the performances took place. During this time, Chris was also conducting his Haldi ceremony as his family rejoiced the upcoming day dancing the night to tassa drumming which is a Caribbean version of dhol.

On August 31st, 2013, our big day, we stood in front of 600 guests and performed all of the rituals of our traditional Hindu wedding ceremony. After using Mandap Designs by Ravi Verma, our mandap stage was built by my uncles, dad and brothers over their pool. The mandap itself was a glamorous crystal butterfly mandap that took all day to situate around the pool and on the stage. Our guests were greeted with golden scrolls that contained a program of our ceremony while they were escorted to the tent that was decorated with yellow and pink draping.

My first dress was a traditional American white ball gown with capped sleeve, sweetheart neck with full crystal working and a 3 ft double trail with lace edging accented with a large orchid bouquet while her second dress was a stone studded mermaid gown with thin diamond accented straps. Chris wore a simple gray suit with an orchid boutonniere. To open our dance floor, we did a flash mob dance with our bridal party, family and friends to a Bollywood song then danced the night away to the sounds of iFete DJ Dev.

What was the hardest part about planning the wedding?

I feel that the hardest part of planning was mostly getting things to my taste and liking. With traditional Guyanese Hindu weddings, most things become repetitive and even in New York the styles and resources are all similar. I felt that this day was for us and we should have a one-of-a-kind day that spoke to our personalities. Being that I’m into fashion and the whole Bollywood theme, it was hard to find tasteful things that were out of the box that didn’t break the bank! Eventually budget went out the window especially when it came to clothing and invitations.

There were so many epic moments during our wedding, it’s hard to have a favorite! I think our favorite moment would be the typical “first sight” at the ceremony. Being the bubbly couple we are we couldn’t help the cheesy smiles on our faces as we saw each other. Later on we both spoke about it and had the same overwhelming feeling, we didn’t know whether we wanted to cry or laugh with excitement but the smiles definitely said what we felt at that exact moment.

Go with it! After so many months of planning, things will still fall out of place. Instead of worrying and trying to fix things, just go with the flow and make the best out of things. At our reception, we had the wrong stage setup and wrong cake, it was actually a plain white cake! There was nothing we could do at that point so we did not even bother to stress about it. We dropped some petals and orchids on the cake and the stage still looked great so we just went along without a care and still had a great time.