BY MAESAM KHAN: Wedding traditions and customs vary greatly between cultures, religions, ethnic groups, countries, and social classes. Most wedding ceremonies involve an exchange of wedding vows by the couple, presentation of a symbolic gift to each other, and a public announcement of marriage by an authority or leader. Special wedding garments are often worn, and most of the times ceremony is by a wedding reception. Music, poetry, prayers or readings from religious books or literature are also commonly incorporated into the ceremony. South Asian countries particularly Pakistan and India celebrate weddings in a more traditional way. There are only few differences in the trends in wedding celebrations; however most of the functions are almost same. In Indo-Pak sub continent people spent a huge amount on wedding celebrations, because they have to follow different ‘Rasms’ or functions which are traditional and they believe that following these traditions will leave the whole celebration incomplete. These include ‘Mehandi’ or ‘Rasm-e-Hina’, ‘Doodh Pilai’, Juta Chupai’ and many other traditional functions, these functions make the celebrations more memorable and it gives the opportunity to come close to eachother. Besides many positive aspects of celebrating wedding traditionally, there are some negative aspects as well. In the current era of financial crisis with different class structures, it is becoming very hard to follow the expensive traditional functions by most of the families. Being forced by the society to follow these traditions, many families suffered very hard time and anxiety to plan and conduct a marriage ceremony. One of the curses includes ‘dowry’ in which bride’s family has to enrich their bride with loads of gold jewellery just because it will bring honour to her and family in the society, no matter what they afford to do it or not. These traditions are bringing curse in the society and is creating a huge difference and dividing the society into sub classes. This division of society into sub classes is becoming one of the reasons of increasing crime ratio. UK is a multicultural and multi ethnic country in which it is said that more than 70 nations are residing. In such atmosphere, practising of traditional culture and values is obvious. Summers and wedding season is at full swing these days, many couples including Asian prefer to be married in this season to enjoy their honeymoon in open and bit hot weather. On the other side, crime ratio also goes up in the summer season because people usually stay out of their homes to enjoy weekends and weekend night, which gives a bright chance to burglars and thieves to pop in t homes to get the valuables. So this is to intimate those houses specially which are under wedding functions and loads of jewellery with them to take special care while leaving from home or elsewhere to avoid any kind of loss.
