Shopping

Wedding Sales

Is there special discounts for people who shop for weddings? Something like a end-of-season sale or a stock-clearance sale? With five weddings to my witness (all my cousins mysteriously decided to get married in quick annual succession), I can safely vouch that an immense load of things (necessary and not) are bought. Also, the bride-to-be's favorite part of her wedding is the shopping.

In a Big Fat Bengali wedding, you will end up shopping for some really random but obvious stuff. The respective families buy an absolute array of items for each other. Cosmetics. Clothes. Underwear (!) Toiletries. Wrist watches. Crockery. Travel bags to fit all of that in.

Honestly, the shopping really isn't half as exciting as they claim. Take for example, shopping for clothes for the bride and groom and both the families. One for the mother-in-law. One for the father-in-law. One for the auntie who is the father-in-law's sister. One for the auntie who is the mother-in-law's sister. One for the uncle who is the father-in-law's brother and another who is the mother-in-law's brother. And you're in a real soup if there happen to be multiple brothers and sisters. 

I'm not even going into the picking and choosing. Let's just say, I've spent more than enough fruitless ventures into innumerable malls, shops and kiosks to know better.

Yet I fail to grasp this strange obsession of brides-to-be with shopping. You'd think they have taken the "shop till you drop" motto too seriously. Countless hours of bickering, hankering, sweating, walking and a good few blisters later, the smiles of glee on the shoppers' faces can easily compare with the smile of a fat kid about to jump into a huge slice of mud pie cake. Well, at least there have been other (worse) times I've lost my faith on humanity.

The Non-shopaholic

Believe me or not, I don't enjoy shopping.

I've noticed how others go crazy over sales and some of them must shop every season or they go into spells of morbidity that are too much to take. Compulsive shopping is something quite alien to me. At times, people even view this as a disorder. "What? You don't like to shop? And you're a girl?" they say to me. Ignoring the particularly overtly sexist overtones, I find myself strangely disinterested in indulgent-shopping.

It's not like I don't shop. There are loads of items of daily need that must be purchased: soap, toothpaste, pens and stationery. However I cannot share the sentiments of some of my friends who feel filial loss if they fail to participate in the ongoing sale season.

My shopping is limited to requirements. If I don't need a new pair of shoes, I don't feel like buying one. Unless my watch stops beyond repair, the prospect of buying another simply does not occur to me. Likewise, If there's no definite purpose, I hate hanging out in malls, looking at stuff I'm never going to buy (or need for that matter) in large glass windows.

Recently I'd been to the shoppers' heaven in Delhi, Janpat, with a friend. There was so much on sale - silver earrings, multi-coloured scarves, hoards of bags of all sizes, shoes, trendy tshirts, home decor and what not! My friend reckons I'm the only person who went in and out of Janpat without having bought anything. It was weird.

Yet, there is one place my inner-shopper comes out - a book store. I spend my entire year's savings in the annual bookfair in my city. I could spend all day in a book store, be it in College Street (the book lovers' paradise in Kolkata) or the fashionable Starmarks in South City Mall. I never run out of the need to but books. I buy books I don't need  and badly need, books I like and highly detest. Only when I come home laden with books that weigh more than myself do I have that glowing smile on my face like Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

I wonder what this makes me, a bookaholic perhaps.