Indian weddings intrigue!

Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham sold Indian weddings to the west as a slice of exotica. But Dutch TV channel BNN wanted to catch the real action. So they were in Surat shooting a wedding, with actress Katya Schuurman, billed to be Holland''s Marilyn Monroe, playing the host.
Like all things Indian, weddings too seem to intrigue them. If the "arranged-match" angle raised eye-brows, the splurge of money evoked disbelief.
"The way men and women meet and marry here is so different from the way they do in the West that we wanted to showcase it to our audience," says producer Tessa Vos.As part of their exploration of a continent each year, BNN goes to four countries and captures different aspects of life. It''s made a film on Bollywood in the past, this time the focus is weddings.
A search on the Net got Tessa in touch with wedding planner Sushil Wadhwa in Mumbai. "They were interested in understanding the way weddings are organised here. This being a mega wedding, we invited them," says Sushil. "The rituals are so elaborate," says Tessa. Adds Katya, "Here people first marry and then fall in love, out there we first fall in love and then marry."