You may have heard about Indian weddings before… TL;DR, if you get invited to one, try your very best to make it. They are extremely cool. But this wedding… I need to disclaim now that this is absolutely NOT representative of what most Indian weddings are like. This is going to be extravagant. My other Indian friends in attendance would caption the obvious, saying “most Indians will never go to a wedding like this in their whole life.” But I’m not going to spend much time talking about the economic dimension of this event. We’re just going to enjoy it for what it is.
With a population of ~4.3 million, Jaipur is the largest city in the magical west-Indian state of Rajasthan. It is also the capital of Rajasthan, and thusly is the center of political and economic power in Rajasthan. Jaipur was not built until 1727, which is relatively late in the grand scheme of India. Indeed, it was constructed from scratch to replace the previous Rajasthani capital, Amber, which—having been a center of power since the 11th century—was apparently getting crowded and having issues with water availability.
Jaipur was the first city in India to have been planned from scratch, and as such, it has some unique features. To me, the most striking of these features is that it adheres to a very strict grid system, like Chicago. In older cities that evolved over centuries or millennia, in India and elsewhere, you will find no such geometric uniformity.
Mumbai's Kamathipura is the oldest red-light district on the Indian subcontinent, and is the 2nd largest on the entire continent of Asia. The 1st largest is Calcutta, which is something that I didn’t realize when I was actually there. If I had we probably would have paid it a visit, like we're about to do in Mumbai.
