Music bands play an integral part in a Big Fat Indian Wedding, especially in North India.
Weddings there are never complete until the families of the bride and groom dance to the tune of popular Bollywood songs. Brass bands are hired to play at the wedding procession, in which the groom's family dances all the way to the wedding venue where the bride's family waits to receive them.
The procession, known as Barat, is usually accompanied by bright lights, fireworks, loud music and dancing, and the bands play a mixture of Indian and western instruments.
The men who make up Indias brass bands are regularly seen marching through cities and towns dressed in their flashy outfits, spicing up parties. Despite their loud presence, they usually go unnoticed.
I wanted to take a closer look and find out more about them. What do they do when theyre not entertaining wedding guests? And what are their day-to-day struggles?
Brass band members normal routine consists of leaving their shops sometime around late afternoon. Once they reach the venue where the wedding procession will start, they often wait hours for the groom's family to gather.
One of the band members told me that, in earlier times, the hours used to stretch on endlessly but now, thanks to mobile phones and internet technology, things are different. They use their mobile phones to kill their boredom huddling together to watch a film on the handsets small screen, listening to songs or talking to their girlfriends.
They also use their phones to download songs and lyrics to help them practice, something they used to do with records and cassettes, which were more expensive.
At one point, I was sitting and talking with the band and I told them that I would print the photos out to show them. But one of the younger band members cut in and said I only had to give them a link and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKaHmzUUYow
