Lessons for a father - The Great Indian Wedding

If you have never participated in an Indian wedding, I would highly recommend that you do so at your earliest convenience. A good Indian wedding is one of the most beautiful experiences you will have.  There is an abundance of everything. A multitude of colors greet you, warmth accompanies you and the food leaves a lasting impression. The Gods visit and stay to make sure us puny humans are doing things right. What continues to be the most important, however, is the people element.

An Indian wedding can either be a dream or a nightmare. The logistics involved, alone, can break a person. Strong are those that make one of these successful. Extremely courageous are those that have charge of more than one in their lives.

I had the good luck of participating in the Great Indian Wedding of one of my own this past week. I cannot begin to describe the experience. My attempt to explain the last week in words would be like someone visiting the Grand Canyon and telling you that it is big and beautiful. It won’t measure up. You have to be there to see what big and beautiful means. It is almost exactly the same for an Indian wedding. You have to live through one, and survive, to tell the tale.  

Lessons for a father, a brother, a son, a husband, a friend and for any human being interested in being successful were many. 

Every event is a project that must meet very high expectations. Every such project has at least 5 sub projects that come together at the end to make the whole. And yes, all of them are priority 1s. Every person involved, especially close relatives, is a client that must leave happy and contented. Lower priority issues, if any, surface unexpectedly and, if not controlled properly, can take the shape of a very big deal (read: sanity threatening) very fast. 

Add to all this my personal favorite. We, Indians that is, still like the personal touch in giving and receiving invitations. None of this new age RSVP’ing and confirming works. So, at any given time, we never know who and exactly how many are attending the ceremonies. It is a guess at best and, like guesses work, is usually wrong.

So what did I learn from the Great Indian Wedding of this week. I think some, most or all of them hold true in almost anything we do:

• ALWAYS have owners of tasks. A task that does not have named owners will have a very high probability of not completing (or starting at all).
• ALWAYS go in with at least 1 second/ back up option wherever possible. Relying, for example, on a single florist to deliver the roses at 7 am might not be a great idea.
• Make sure that you take care of your own people. Those misses are the ones that really hurt.
• Make sure that everyone involved knows what needs to be done, why it needs to be done and what your expectations of quality are. Remember, sometimes good enough is perfect.
• Have a team of very reliable people around you that can think and take decisions by themselves. We might have to look, unapologetically, outside of the core to make this team.
• Make sure that the level and quality of communication is very high at all times.
• Don’t take on or work on things that are really not important and can wait.
• Sharpen your negotiation skills. It never hurts to be a good negotiator in no matter what we do.
• Rest, rest, rest, rest, rest. Take a break whenever possible. No problem ever got solved with tired and sleepy people.

I am sure that there are numerous more lessons one can take home from an Indian wedding. It is indeed the Grand Canyon of all ceremonies. We are happy that our own started a new life and we were there to celebrate this new beginning with them. Our coming together and being in one place for, and with, each other was what was important. 

Everything else was and always will be just a great show!