The Daily Rupee, from The IndiaPay Times satire desk. This is satire.
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₹93.92PLANO, TX. A cousin’s wedding in Pune, still five months away, is now being budgeted on two separate spreadsheets, one in dollars and one in rupees, and as of Sunday the two documents disagree on the cost of flowers, family members confirmed.
“The dollar sheet says flowers are a small line,” said Anil, 49, who visited India last winter for the first time in 12 years and was promptly named treasurer. “The rupee sheet says flowers are a very large number with many zeros. Same flowers. I am only asking.”
Family members said the dollar sheet has fourteen color-coded tabs and is updated nightly from a garage in Plano. The rupee sheet is a notebook kept by an aunt in Pune, photographed each evening at an angle that makes the bottom row unreadable.
The two documents are reconciled twice a week on a video call scheduled for 7 AM in Texas and 6:30 PM in Pune, a time that suits no one equally. Attendees said the calls usually begin with the budget and end with someone’s marriage plans, most often Anil’s.
“I asked the decorator if I could pay with a payment app,” Anil told the group. “He asked if the app was a relative.”
At 4 AM India time on Thursday, Anil’s mother forwarded the family group a message titled “Wedding Budgets Never Overshoot If You Drink Warm Water Daily,” along with a photograph of a lemon. No one has asked for clarification on the lemon.
Sources close to the family also noted that a wedding attended last year by Sharma Ji’s son came in under budget and was, according to one aunt, “also very tasteful.” No photographs were available. Sharma Ji’s son was not reached for comment, as he has not been reached for comment since 2019.
A senior researcher at an institute nobody could name said two-currency budgets tend to grow according to what he called the Miscellaneous Constant. “Every line gets a little bigger each time it crosses an ocean,” he said. “Nobody adds anything. It simply arrives.”
By Sunday evening the committee had agreed on a single final number, which appears on neither sheet. It is the figure Anil’s mother mentioned in the first five minutes of the first call, in October, before anyone had opened a laptop. Everyone said it was too high. Everyone has already sent their share.
Miscellaneous remains the largest line on both sheets.
Not satire: if you are budgeting a real wedding across two currencies, here is a look at what an Indian wedding actually costs once someone prices it. Our guide, Guddu’s Dad Is Getting Married Again. We Priced the Wedding., has the real numbers.
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