Recently, husband and I were invited to the wedding. As usual, we were haunted by the key question, what gift should we be giving to the couple?
In our own wedding, we received tons of glass vases. Initially, we thought that maybe this is what people liked, so even we gifted other people glasses and glass vases for weddings. But after several months of storing vases in our own house (which after nearly 3 years are still collecting dust), we realized they were of no practical use to us and neither would they be to any one else. So we stopped giving gifts altogether when we went for weddings.
Early this year however, we again had a spate of weddings to attend to in February - some included NRIs. Giving any gift in kind to an NRI is useless since they are anyway unlikely to carry it with them. So we gifted them money. Since we were gifting our NRI friends money, we decided to gift the Indian ones money too. Since there were at least 15 weddings we attended in a row, we did not place any great significance on the amounts we were gifting - which were different for different couples for no reason.
This time during the wedding season however, we were confronted with another question, how much is good enough to gift? Should it be based on your earning capacity, or should it be based on the cost per plate of food that we eat in the wedding? Or should it be based on how close we were to the couple getting married? Is INR 500 too little and INR 1500 just touching the mark then? We had no clear answers. Eventually, we decided, it is neither costs nor how much you earn, nor how close you are that should determine what you give. You should give what you feel like giving from your heart to that couple.
