Rain Dance - In the Eye of Storm

A few years ago we did a wedding in the month of October. The bride envisioned an outdoor Garden wedding. A garden wedding in the month of October is like oil and water. They just don't mix. 

We tried long and hard to convince the bride the this was not a good idea that she was asking for trouble. But all efforts were futile in front of the determined bride. The ten days leading up to the wedding were bright and sunny. It instilled a confidence in us that the wedding would go off without a glitch. In any case we had a few contingency plans in place to make sure that we could deal with any unforeseen weather issues.

The day of the mehendi arrived which was the first event of the wedding. It was partly cloudy and we had waterproof tents in place so we weren't worried about anything.

The event went off without any problems. No rain, just pleasant Bangalore weather. The next evening was the sangeet and as we were setting up, a slight drizzle decided to bless the occasion. Again no harm no foul as it was just a passing drizzle and the event was partially indoors. 

That night we instructed the venue decorator (not our team as the venue did not allow teams from outside to do decor at this particular venue) not to do the entire set up outside but to wait till the early mornings to see what the weather situation would be like. The design was very simple. It didn't require a lot of time or effort and hence could have been done in the wee hours of the morning.

As I woke up at around 4 a.m., I realized that it was raining like crazy. I immediately call Rose to check if it is raining in her part of town, luckily it wasn't. Now we both hoped that it wasn’t raining at the venue.  

As we reached the venue at 5 a.m. Our worst fear came true - it has been raining all morning and was still raining heavily. Luckily we had told the decorator not to do the decor and that now it can be done indoors. As we drove past the lawn, to our shock we saw  that the decorator had not listened to us and went ahead and did the entire set up before it started raining. Now the seats was soaked and Mandap has started disintegrating due to the heavy rain that the flowers were not able to take.

We decided to call the decorator and discuss with him what would be our next steps to fix this situation. As we spoke to him he refused to come to the venue and he said that now that it's raining its raining and there's nothing that he can do. The basic difference between our team and other vendors is that we have a can-do attitude and can fix any problem that we are faced with. Our next call was to our client to inform them of what had happened. That's when it dawned on us  that it wasn't raining in their part of town and they had no clue of what was waiting for them.

We briefed them on the situation and told them that we would figure something out by the time they got to the venue. in the meantime we had spoken to the decorator almost 7 times. finally convince him to start moving the decor elements inside whatever was left of it and to get new chairs with covers. After a lot of pleading and negotiating he finally agreed to get us a new set of chairs and move the Mandap structure inside and add a few new flowers. 

Within an hour we did a complete turnaround. We made sure that the Mandap was dry and a new carpet was put in just in case and the chairs were dry, clean, neat and ready to be used by the guests. We also made sure that the breakfast was ready to be served and that the dining hall was completely setup as a South Indian wedding begin with a hearty breakfast.

Even though our bride didn’t get the garden wedding she wanted, we made sure we gave her a beautiful wedding nevertheless.