Just Married
November 25, 2022
8 years ago, I met the love of my life. On this special Thanksgiving Day, we fully sealed the deal—Nepalese style.
Being married is the coolest feeling ever. I mean, just the idea of marriage as an institution itself is pretty wild. A peculiar formality. You both sign papers with acknowledgement from the government, and you swear to live the rest of your life with this other human, who—by some insane chance—you’ve come to learn is your person. But I digress! It’s an incredible feeling to formally announce your commitment, and to tie the knot with your friends and family cheering you on. I feel we have a long, vibrant life ahead of us filled with many epic adventures and equally exhilarating trials and tribulations. But as the wise sage Bruce Lee once remarked: pray not for an easy life, but the strength to endure a challenging one. And being married brings about challenges in its own beautiful way.
Aaaaanyways. It’s 1 am, and I’m very tired right now, but heck, I’ll write what I’m feeling anyway. We’ve dreamt of this moment together for years. Pulling off a wedding is no easy feat, especially Hindu weddings. And we planned all of it remotely while we were in California and all the action is in Colorado. It really does take an entire village. And when so much of it is based on culture and religion, how it’s done is generally already decided by tradition. There’s not much room to deviate there. Overall, I’m just feeling insanely grateful for all the help we got from our amazing family to do it. And, I’m quite proud of how we shared our love with the rest of the world in our own unique way. A little bit of self-praise could never hurt, I suppose.
First off, I’m so stoked on the website we created. A long time ago, I had decided that I wasn’t going to settle for a standard off-the-shelf website for my wedding. So I rolled up my sleeves and got right down to handcrafting a custom interactive 3D website. This included included designing custom models in Blender, importing them into into a 3D scene (using three.js), and rendering it in realtime on the browser. There are some cool postprocessing effects and other fun, nerdy graphics-y things (which I’ll save for later otherwise this post will no longer be about getting married) I had to build to get the final look, but we eventually got there after a few late nights of work. It’s during times like these that I’m grateful and fortunate for having had the opportunity to work on stuff like this before. Most of it was very enjoyable even if it was time-consuming amongst the million other priorities we had for the wedding :D.
It worked out quite well, and looked pretty cool too. I also love that I was able to embed a song I wrote for Pallavi as a backing track to the website. It makes for a pretty neat experience when you’re RSVPing to a wedding. Fun fact: it’s an instrumental version of the very same song which I sang to her when I proposed to her. Being able to incorporate these very personal details into these monumental life events gives me tremendous joy. It makes it all the more special to look back on, knowing that we have a leaving, breathing piece of art (delivered via the medium of software and computing) and I’ll always have this website online for anyone to look at.
Another notable detail we incorporated is this. Back in 2015 when we first met, we started hanging out because we wanted to perform a song together at a cultural event at our university. The very song which we practiced and through which our relationship blossomed—we ended up playing it at our wedding reception. I still can’t believe we did it. We were quite inebriation, so I’m pretty sure we didn’t sound very good. But what matters is we had a ton of fun doing it. We’ve decided to record that song properly at our home studio.
What was a surreal feeling. It feels as if we’ve come full circle. And here we are, as we close out this page. Onto writing the next one—together. What’s next, you say? We’ll keep re-discovering each other in new ways, keep playing music together, and keep adventuring. Love is beautiful. And love is collaborative art.
