Physical Intelligence - Day 49
CityVP Manjit
Weddings and the parties that arise in the Summer and Fall are definitely a test for physical intelligence, and weddings that are planned during what are called "long weekends" ironically shorten the weekend for those who have been invited to attend them. I remember a time when we lived in the poor end of London when weddings were 'One and Done" - the party followed the wedding on the same day and it was finished. Now there is a one-upmanship culture in my particular community where a wedding is not complete without three or four visits to a banquet hall, all on different days. Silently these people fret and worry how they will save up for these expensive events, never mind other expensive investments such as the cost of a modern education. All of these lack any physically intelligent design.
I am now facing tonight logging this after 1am and the same will be true tomorrow for what is b being called the main wedding reception. There is a valued part of a wedding reception which has a good physical intelligence component to it, which is that weddings involve dancing. The downside is that me treating the dance floor as a gym routine accompanies with it negatively social reviews. Even the dancing has to fit a set pattern or ritual all determined today by these professionally paid people, with their special interest personal branding, that suggests people are doing them a favour by paying over-the-top rates for all manner of specialist wedding services. We even get to dance tomorrow on a custom flooring with printed logo and names of the bridge and groom. The only thing these wedding planners do not promise is getting Steven Spielberg to deliver the wedding video.
At least in the physical intelligence arena there are fitness people involves also, such as those who promise to get the bride "Wedding ready" :
For every fitness person who takes this into account, there is a wedding industry representative who make all of this sound like it is a cultural norm and therefore set the new bar on what folks plan for and create, so wedding guests like me can attend longer and bigger mega events :
The idea that the dance floor is something I can own when I attend an Indian wedding is however now being shaken up by the rise of professional choreography, and here wedding planners are beginning to dictate when we can dance, for how long and how much we have to sit back and watch as a part of the "EVENT" - the choreograph attached in the next video seems wonderful, but it is not far off what my community attempt to do, including wearing these beautiful but mega expensive outfits, and as this appears, it is copied into future weddings, as the cost of Indian weddings continue to escalate through the roof.
At a certain point it is actually worth sitting next to cynical and cranky old geezers who opine at the extravagance and how it is about the creation of an ego-feeding event rather than a courtesy to the wedding guest, which over this summer I will be one of, multiple times, but thankfully not this year as a host. The best bits from one geezer was who joked "want to see $60,000 go up in flames in one night!" - just look at what is happening here". . . . .
The bottom dollar for me is that there are physical intelligence aspects to these events and one thing I am thankful for is that at least my own family has used weddings as means of deciding who is in and who is out (via invitations). That however does not statistically reduce the number of weddings, only the number of guests. That the guest list for our weddings would have topped 1000 had we not followed this pruning strategy is great pause for thought, but I have not been at a single family event that was not in the 500 to 600 people range. This is why I have argued vociferously for DESTINATION WEDDINGS. Yet even here wedding planners have found ways of adding videography into the cost - so that people like me cannot get to pay for a sensibly priced high quality wedding experience :
It is not at beBee that I encountered the actual hardcore reality of personally branded existence, the personal brand as exhibited through Indian wedding culture is frickin insane. Ultimately it is big enough and loud enough to cut right into my own individual efforts towards having a saner and wiser attitude about physical intelligence. I will be a pariah if I put my own physical intelligence goals in front of the social face which is branded by wedding industry people. As each incremental unit of brand layers itself upon the previous - the cost of weddings has not hit an upper limit yet . Somehow people find ways to meet the escalating cost and price. For me the account here is not just a diatribe about a society that has not seen fit to question the economic viability of escalating events this way, but an individual realization of what it is I can do make these events a little bit more physically intelligent for myself, without appearing to be a killjoy who is "spoiling" the sense of occasion. It is now 2am and it is Sunday morning and when I wake up, there is one more party left for this particular wedding, but it is the prelude to other events that are just complex and mega expensive in their delivery - and all of it a challenge to my own physical intelligence practice.
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