My 2023 Recap: We Got Married.
Everything you need to know about my 2023 in one place.
My 2023 Recap.
It’s been a minute since I’ve written one of these, but I’ve been feeling this wind of writing momentum hit me. This wind started during my Honeymoon, where I quietly kickstarted this blog and began to opine and reflect again. After returning to America, I was afraid that the pressures of productivity would swallow the writer in me whole. Alas, here we are.
I’ve been getting all kinds of messages in my inbox about templates an annual review. There are many, to be sure, which are incredibly helpful. But as I started to think about 2023, I was really only able to think of one event: we got married. Not because that was the only good thing that happened. But because in examining the wedding, it feels like I actually gleamed the lessons of 2023 clearly.
Before our wedding, I’d been to 22 weddings as an adult. And truly, each of them have been such a privilege to go to. I don’t use the word privilege lightly. It’s a privilege to have seen couples celebrate their most special day on earth, and do so with music, food, and an atmosphere of pure love in the air. And how awesome it is to be a guest.
No matter how involved you are with the people getting married, being a guest was a comfortable and a near-exclusively pleasant experience. Hyping up the couple; dancing, and singing, my heart out; and then, quietly reflecting on what made them special had become a habit of mine. What else is the point of life?
But now, you’re telling me, it was our turn? Actually, it wasn’t until halfway through our celebrations, during the Sangeet, that it sank in that it was our moment. It was wedding #23, and this was ours to regale in.
Our Wedding
Angeli and I had poured our hearts and souls into the planning of it. We tried to infuse it with as much of “us” as we could. It helped that we got the blessings of our parents to run it our way, and focus on doing our relationship justice. Yes, our parents had a few desires, but none of them really conflicted with our vision of what a weekend might look like.
We made the decision to do ours in Mexico City on a hike. I’ll never forget where we were — off the Lake Chabot loop, near San Leandro. It was the first decision we made. If we could find a way to do it on a comparably reasonable budget, then we both figured it would be worth it. Besides what city captured the love and colorfulness with which we tried to live our lives like CDMX?
There are many details we’ve reflected on from our wedding. On the last night of our Honeymoon, we drank two low quality glasses of port, and went through 2 hours straight of recounting every detail that stood out to us. And even that felt like we were rushing it.
As I write about it now, though, here’s a few moments that are etched in my memory. In no particular order:
Walking to the dinner the night before every event, where I saw my cousins from Texas and my friends bond; and along the way, introducing Angeli’s uncle to my college roommate. The first “oh my god, our villages are mixing” moment.
The surprisingly bombastic and festive Haldi (which we planned, only a few days before) and the sneaky ways in which everyone got the bright orange turmeric all over our faces.
The absolutely epic speeches and performances of our friends (a small moment here, where my groomsmen and I got on our knees and serenaded Angeli to a Penn Masala ‘09 banger, Ya Ali / Lovestoned).
The pre-gaming of the Reception with my groomsmen and my parents, in which everyone -- including my dad -- freestyle rapped over an instrumental beat. Will share as requested :)
The open-air Baraat where we got on a bus and rounded the city and seeing the city, with 2 hours of sleep under my belt, dancing until we met the Azetc warriors at the bottom of the bus.
The quirky, uniquely personal ways in which each person showed up and blasted love at us (I mean, decorating our bed with roses!).
The serenading of all of our friends, as they slow danced, to me and Angeli singing Lucky by Jason Mraz. And then encoring again with Closer.
The high school graduation speech I got to re-give at a private corridor with the MVHS stronghold.
The ending, when we kept the dance floor alive till 3 AM, singing Avril Lavagne’s Complicated
And then, the ceremony.
I have to say that of all the details from the wedding, the one that shines brightest is our ceremony because it felt like an out of body experience. People should privately ask Angeli to send her the text she wrote to her brother describing the ceremony. If I had it here, I’d copy paste it into this blog.
From my lens of it, walking into the Lion King soundtrack with my mom and dad on both sides of me, seeing our whole communities before us, and then turning around to watch my bride in her majestic outfit, to a fittingly divine tune, was nothing short of… well, divine. It felt like we had died and ascended to the Heavens where all that remained were people who loved us. Is this what happens when you die?
And I felt the enormity of someone taking this bet with me. That’s what she’s doing, after all. This girl from Dublin, Georgia. This girl who I met a conference, whose number I had somehow mustered. She, who had become part of my world, my family, many of my friends, and said “yes,” to the question of being together two years prior, was sitting right before me ready to be married.
As we got up to say our vows to each other, I lost it in the first paragraph. I’m not sure where the storm of tears came from because it wasn’t a casually cool sniffle; it was a torrential downpour. Perhaps, I think they came from many small imprints over all these years. I sensed the enormity of the moment; and innocence with which this girl was looking at me, so hopefully. After the serenity of the Vedic tradition, set to Indian classical music I’d learned my whole life, I took one look at Jeevan Saathi and lost all composure.
Safe to say, none of this would’ve been possible without our parents (obviously), or our closest friends. They poured their hearts out for us. They called us before our big days. They texted us to keep our peace of mind present. They cooked for us on the days leading up to the wedding. They choreographed our dances, and sneaked in surprises. And in their own, particular ways, made our wedding, theirs. I’ve heard people, in most of the 22 weddings I’d been to, say things like “we don’t even know how to begin thanking you,” or “words cannot even express…” I get it. I concede. Words can’t really do it.
How is this, alone, my annual reflection?
During the last two years, when people would ask how we were doing and the answer veered into, “we’re planning our wedding,” many of them would give us a knowing look, and then provide an audible to the effect of: “Oh, we get it. We know what this process is like.”
Yes, they probably did get it. Particularly the Desi couples. They’d get the subtleties of interfamilial stakeholder management; navigating conversations around money, culture, religion — not exactly light topics and the litany of documents, sheets, and PDFs it would take to stay organized for a 3-day festival, all neatly tucked into a Google Drive folder.
On top of that, there are many peculiarities that come up during the planning of a wedding. I’d been recovering from a herniated disc which had proven stubborn in its healing timeline, forcing me to take time off and press PAUSE on all of life; I’d been making sense of an extended family fallout, a topic which had occupied far more mental space than I’d given it; and in the midst of that, I’d been planning for a seismic professional transition to take place in 2024.
I could’ve written about each of those peculiarities and described the wins that accompanied each of them in my annual review; I mean, I’ve started to bike now; after the challenges with extended family members, I trust myself and my parents to live by our values; and yes, I feel ready to bet big, and exclusively, on Mandala. Those are blog posts, in themselves.
But zooming in on the wedding makes more sense to me. Lurking in the journey of moving from “let’s get married” to actually marrying, there are lessons (for me) which I’m keen on applying to my life. I’m smiling because I know I’ve written a version of these takeaways in 2010, or 2016, but they feel all the more relevant now that Angeli and I are beginning to build, and the words inhabit a different sort of power.
Lesson #1: Make the main thing, the main thing.
During the course of planning an engagement for a close friend of mine, I’d heard one piece of advice from his sister, summarily put as “well, we’re here to make the main thing, the main thing.” I’ve heard LeBron say as much during a postgame interview, when confronted by media members about some noisy bit of sports gossip.
That’s the advice that two of my closest friends shared in a pre-game text message before our wedding: “TG, make the main thing, the main thing.” And, yes, that’s the message that Angeli and I hope to channel as we embark on the rest of our lives.
There are always sideshows in life; distractions that could, and in my personal experience, have captured my attention so much that I lose focus on the primary objective at hand. Any contemplative tradition would suggest that the nature of the mind, is itself, to wander and get lost in its own fantasies of nothingness. And what a loss that is for the present moment.
Because if I step back and think about it, there’s always a main thing, or a raison d’etre, in a given situation; If everything about a particular situation went southwards, what’s the one thing that would matter most to me? And if I can tune into that for myself, in a given moment, I can drown out the surrounding noise which can otherwise ensnare my attention.
Germane to our wedding, there were a few intrusive thoughts that would arise; or a few minor annoyances that would pop their head up during the weekend (although, candidly, not as many as I’d expected!). Just watching them unfold, and then returning back to the creed of “main thing” was a grounding force in otherwise chaotic life.
Lesson #2: Play to your values, not to some trope of an audience.
When I think of why I’m proud of our wedding, it felt like Angeli and I were able to play to the highest aspirations of our values. We got to embody those values without unneeded attention to what “people will think.” We trusted them to love us, for simply being us.
What did that mean? I had every single groomsmen speak, believing that each was essential to that day happening, and each had a voice to be dignified. Weeks before the wedding, Angeli and I brought our priest together on a call with our close friends to plan our ceremony in a way that would be both intimate and grounded in tradition. My parents smoked a fake joint! And yes, we closed the night out singing Avril Lavigne’s song Complicated in a semicircle.
Beautifully, in letting go of the trope -- and I use that word deliberately -- of what “people would want,” we were able to lock into just being us; living by our ideals for a weekend we hosted. Ultimately, that meant freedom. In that freedom, there’s no evaluation. There’s no anxiety. There’s just being. Which is such a perfect place from which to receive the love and the warmth of our communities.
If this feels trite, let me emphasize what a departure this is for me. I’ve been disciplined as a political organizer or as a product marketer or as a young founder to focus on the audience, and listen to them. There’s a power in that wisdom, one that few too companies, candidates and people get right. But, there’s also a beauty of just letting go of the things that usually come with that.
The fear of getting something wrong. Or the fear of disappointing “people.” All of the things that may have previously consumed us were absent during our planning process. And in that way, I feel proud. If we can live our lives or run our companies with a devotion to values over an anxiety over what “people will say,” there’s a new space that evolves. Which brings me to my last lesson, one that I learn and re-learn every year.
Lesson #3: Lean on your people.
During the second half of our Honeymoon, Angeli and I visited South Africa. And we spent time internalizing Mandela’s life, digesting podcasts about him, and reading the second half of his autobiography. Throughout Mandela’s own recounting, he remarks that the biggest blindspot of the government was that they allowed the resistance to congregate and be around one another.
On our tour of Robben Island, our guide, who had spent five years in prison as a freedom fighter, shared from his own personal experiences that the prisoners who had found themselves there stayed together. There was deep solidarity and alignment. And in leaning on another and channeling the essence of Ubuntu, they were able to build power.
“That’s how we build power. They had no idea what they were doing in allowing us to be together. That’s how humans build power.”
On the plane ride home, as I reflected on how I’ve built power, I came to the same conclusion. With the glaring caveat that my friends had not been in prison with me, it felt like they were the anchors I’d held onto over the course of my own life. Candidly, this last point was a reminder I needed.
Somewhere along the last few years, I’d worried that “leaning on” friends might burden them. So much so that I wanted to lean back, not on them. I equated respecting people’s boundaries and space with not wanting to rely on friends. As if there was some glory to hyper-independence. Sure enough, the same two characters who had sent me pre-game texts, said “lean on us, TG.”
Lean on them, I did. From running errands and picking up hair wax the night before the wedding to keeping me company as I got my hair and beard done to sleeping over and hanging out with me before the ceremony to setting up a digital portal for my grandfather in India to dial in to talking me through all my “holy shit why I am thinking this right now” thoughts to making me laugh to meditating briefly with me to texting me reminders before the big day to unwaveringly smiling at me during the ceremony to staying up late and belting all of my favorite Blink 182 songs with me.
Angeli and I bonded over this a long time ago. The ending of our first official date was the two of us at a nondescript bar in Palo Alto, Old Pro’s, where I asked her sheepishly why she finally agreed to go on a date with me and not just be my friend. She said it was my friends, and the fact that I valued them so much. She quoted a proverb her Dada had shared, and one that my mom had touted, “show me your friends, I’ll tell you who you are.”
These lessons that I feel I internalized through this journey of being married and moving through 2023 feel like pretty compelling guideposts for 2024. As I build my business and prepare to make it my full time career, or begin a new family with my wife, or even maintain my health, it strikes me to do the following:
1- Keep the main thing, the main thing.
2- To play by my values, not some trope of an audience.
3- To lean on my people.
Rinse & repeat.