Picture of Kuldip Gohil

Kuldip marries Chetna on 1st March 2009. I attended his marriage at Bhavnagar.

Every country has a different marriage tradition. And when you look at India with so many religions and dialects, it is even fun to go and attend a marriage ceremony.

People call me workaholic and honestly speaking running a Drupal Services company with 40+ resources does take a lot of effort. When Kuldip Gohil joined the company about 18 months back as an intern, he was very skeptical. He was working in night shift learning Drupal Support and had no clue on what was going on as majority of senior developers were working in morning shifts in India. I was in Surrey, BC at that time and Dheeraj informed me that we need to shift Kuldip to morning shift.

It took Kuldip about 4 months but after that he had consistently delivered A+ performance and has been the principal developer and architect of Galaminds - http://www.galaminds.com.

When Kuldip spoke to me about his engagement last year to Chetna, I was very excited. Only me, Dheeraj and Hiren were married out of our 40 person team. We will now have company. Yeppie!!

I moved back to India in April 2008 to work with the team and bring in innovation in Drupal products business. What I found working with Kuldip is that Kuldip has one of the best work ethics - he doesn't spend time on chat, gossips, etc. He continuously strives to innovate and improve on the product. He speaks very less but has helped almost every one in every Drupal project with technical guidance. In February, I was given the marriage invitation card. I enquired about how marriage ritual were done in their caste and from what Kuldip told me, it aroused my curiosity as the culture in Bhavnagar was different. He comes from "Darbar" caste i.e warriors and people in company call Kuldip as "Bapu" (Not Gandhi Bapu)

His Marriage was on 1st March. There was function on 28th February evening too so we started on 28th February. I had health issues so Niraj Bhatt(our former Linux Expert who recently joined TCS) volunteered to Drive me there. My family - Rina and Kids - Sulay and Aman also accompanied me. Many of the company employees also had taken leave to attend his marriage.

It was a 4 hour drive from Ahmedabad to Bhavnagar and we reached there by 8:30. Function was at Kutchi Samaj Hall in Bhavnagar and we went straight there. It was a Garba / Dandia function and many of us danced to the traditional dandia beats. Then we had a Dinner after which we went home. There were about 300 to 400 people at the Dinner.

Darbar community has lot of importance for "Sword".  I came to know this for the first them when I saw it with my eyes. Jayraj, one of our intern did a sword dance there.

Here is an interesting thing which I had never seen in India marriage.

5 family members/friends of Kuldip will take Kuldip's sword(but not Kuldip) and go to Chetna(bride)'s place. Darbar's call this as "Veli". Chetna will wed Kuldip's sword and her family will then see her off(vidaii) from her residence with only 1 person. So 5 family members, Kuldip's bride Chetna, 1 family member of Chetna and the Wedding "Sword" will return back the previous day of marriage in the city where marriage is to happen. Chetna's family incidently was 50 kms away. Chetna will stay overnight at some relative's place and wait for next day for Kuldip to marry her.

There is a story behind this which I had seen in movies in my childhood days but was told at the ceremony. Years ago the Groom himself used to go to bride's place to wed her. But Dacaits in those days would see the Groom going for wedding. They will wait on the road for groom to return and on the way back they used to rob the bride and kill the groom. The tradition then changed where groom stayed back home and only the "Sword" was sent to bring the bride.

I was given accomodation at Narayani Palace - a very nice place. I stayed there with my family and kids while the other company employees - all bachelors enjoyed the whole night in partying.

Next day morning, I moved around Bhavnagar city and visited few places and met parents of few other employees who were from Bhavnagar. In the afternoon, we had a great lunch feast. About 1000 people were there at Lunch. Rajat Gupta also turned up from Ahmedabad to attend his marriage.

At 6:30, there was the marriage procession which started from the marriage hall i.e Kutchi Samaj hall in Bhavnagar. Kuldip sat on the Chariot and there was band playing songs and people dancing. Fire Crackers went off for entire 90 minutes of procession.

Kuldip's chariot was driven to a cross road. At the cross road, there was a car waiting with bride Chetna sitting in it. When the band reached the cross roads, Kuldip descended from the Chariot and sat in the car with Chetna. The band and entire procession then returned back to Kutchi Samaj hall. Again there were many Sword dances played in traditional way by other family member and friends in the entire procession.  It was getting late.. Rakshit already left early at 5:30 and Rajat left at 7:00. There was a small girl who got cut across her eye when a fire cracker burst near her and she was taken to hospital.

Jayraj convinced me that I should stay back in Bhavnagar for 1 more day and visit Palitana temples. Me, Barinder, Ujval, Kuldip Zala(second Kuldip in our office), agreed on this. Niraj, Rajat and Rakshit left for Ahmedabad to attend work on Monday. It was all fun. I was so busy in learning new things that I forgot to take more pictures but I am sure when Kuldip is back in office on 21st March, I will ask him to update this blog post with more pictures. Hospitality was awesome, food delicious, I just loved it.

Looking forward to my next Bhavnagar trip.