Celebrating The Right Things The Right Way - By Vaibhav Mohan

Last weekend I was in the Hamptons with friends. For the uninitiated, the Hamptons is where the rich people of New York City (both nouveau and old school) live and / or go to spend their weekends, especially during the summers. It is a fountain of privilege, class, rich taste and obnoxious display of wealth. Most New York based senior finance professionals worth their salt either have a second home there or aspire to - it comes with serious bragging rights and it is a powerful statement to start a Monday morning meeting by complaining about the commute from the Hamptons back into the City. OK, so an explanation is in order since none of the sentences after the first sentence in this paragraph apply to me - so what was I doing there?

I was attending the wedding celebration of close friends - but this was no ordinary wedding, in fact it is one of the most unique events that I have attended and made me ponder about a number of things primarily related to the subject of this write up. My friends L & R got married last month in a low key court marriage after which they put together an epic fun filled, six week long celebration where they got to spend quality time with friends and family. The venue for this was a rented vacation home in the Hamptons where they invited various sets of friends and family to come and live with them for a few days - so they put together a six week itinerary of rotating guests with every group spending two to three days with them at the property. Aside from the eating and drinking, there were a bunch of activities on the menu - barbecue by the pool, football on the beach, wine tasting, board games, exploring the area and getting a feel for what “spending a weekend at the Hamptons means”. What a fantastic idea - instead of the rushed short lived interactions that tend to happen at weddings in general, they were able to spend some real time with a sizable but chosen set of people.

It was inevitable that I would end up comparing this to my wedding which was something entirely different - a colossal eight hundred people bonanza, most of whom we didn’t know or care about. Granted, it was a different time (2011), the venue was India and like all Indian weddings, this was an event that our parents had put together for their friends and relatives. Our friends were incidental and welcome to join the festivities! No one asked us how or what we wanted to celebrate. The fact that it was an arranged marriage didn’t help much as well - we barely knew each other and it would probably have been hard to come to an agreement on these questions even if we were given a choice, not to insinuate that we can easily build consensus now:). It’s been twelve years, and when I look back, there aren’t a lot of fond memories of the actual day or celebration itself. Sure it wasn’t as drab and uneventful as I am making it out to be, some of my friends showed up, got drunk, danced to the latest Bollywood numbers and (I’d like to think) flirted with some of my wife’s friends plus there was the quintessential drama filled fit thrown by an irrelevant relative of mine about not being treated with the “proper respect” (he was from the groom’s side after all!) - so it was like most other weddings at the time.

I also started thinking about how we tend to celebrate things that we think others want us to celebrate and in ways that others want us to. I am certainly guilty of this and I know people in my personal and professional orbit (including the rich Hampton guys) who do this all the time - anniversaries, kid’s birthdays, milestone birthdays etc. all conforming to some template influenced by irrelevant opinions, some probably from social media. Why not invest all this time, money, resources into something that we really care about without thinking about anyone else’s opinion. I am not sure what is the right approach to solving this - perhaps taking the time to self introspect and determine what is important, what needs to be celebrated and in what way. It takes courage and clarity of thought to do so. Here is to L and R - thanks for an amazing, memorable weekend and wishing them a happy and convention-busting married life - may you keep being creative and inspiring everyone around you to do so as well!