Playing their weddings Marathi calligraphy cards right

Playing their cards right

Gone are the days when wedding cards used boring, formal and mundane language. Couples these days are experimenting with ideas for wedding cards that reflect their individuality. Adman Sumanto Chattopadhyay believes that caste and creed have taken a backseat today.
“The marriage scenario has evolved considerably and love has taken precedence over all the other formalities,” he says.One of Sumanto’s colleagues, who got married recently, sent a wedding invitation to everybody on beer bottles.
“The message on the bottle read: ‘Marriages may have ended because of alcohol. But in our case, two people have come together because of this liquid.’ Invitation details were given on the label’s backside. Another friend of Sumanto had her wedding card printed on two magnets. “The idea was to exemplify attraction between two opposite people,” he remarks.
According to well-known calligraphy artist Achyut Palav, wedding cards today have become more like souvenirs. “The wedding card has developed a personality of its own. Couples want to create something which their friends would like to retain as a keepsake, rather than the traditional wedding card which usually goes into the trash can the very next day,” says Palav.
The artist had once created a wedding invitation for a couple which just had a single phrase, the date and the venue on it. The line read in Marathi: ‘Aarti Gajanana chi. Gajanana chi aarti.’ “When the invitation is meant for close friends, then why do you need all that elaborate information,” questions Palav.
Such cards also generated a lot of response from friends who you have never heard from since ages. Aarti Khatr, a branding and research professional, who just got married to the love of her life Chetan, has designed a wedding card that has the Zoozoo characters from the famous TV ad.
In another out-of-the-box invitation Sumit Rohatgi, marketing professional, designed an invite for brother Jayant and sister-in-law Ragani Parmar which looked like a DVD cover with a witty cartoon strip of the couple running on it. The DVD was titled ‘Imperfectly Perfect’ and had a paper cutting in the shape of a disc inside, which spelt out the wedding details.
Designer Aki Narula remembers the wedding card of his close friend Parul Khanna. “Wedding cards today reflect the fact that marriages are no longer just between families but between two individuals. This wedding card of my friend was unlike any other card I have seen before. It was entirely made of blood red silk fabric and had gold khadi printing on it. It was so simple and yet so stylish that it took me back to the Mughal era.”