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Exclusive Images: The ShashiTharoor wedding
Jay Mandal/On Assignment, who was the only photographer present at the event, brings you exclusive images of the event for Rediff.com readers.
In a typical Malayali wedding, former Union minister Shashi Tharoor tied the knot with Sunanda Pushkar at his ancestral home at Kollengode village, 40 km from Palakkad on Sunday.
Tharoor, a former United Nations under secretary general and now a member of the Lok Sabha, tied the taali (the Malayali version of the mangalsutra), symbolising the marital bond as per Hindu custom, amid the accompaniment of a percussion and windpipe orchestra, the nadaswaram, shortly before 8.30 am.
While Tharoor wore the traditional Malayali kurta and mundu (dhoti), Sunanda, who hails from Kashmir, wore an off-white veshti-mundu like any Malayali bride would do at her wedding.
Text: PTI, Rediff News Bureau
The couple sought the elders' blessings
The tying of the taali was followed by an exchange of garlands and handing over the pudava, a piece of new cloth, to the bride by the bridegroom, a long-followed tradition among the matrilineal Nair families in Kerala.
Only family and close friends were invited
The invitation to the wedding on the eve of ThiruvOnam was limited to close relatives, friends and well-wishers.
The bridal party included Sunanda's father Colonel Pushkarnath Das (retired) and her brother Colonel Rajesh Pushkar.
Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar was the only senior politician present at the marriage.
Tharoor's mother Lily Tharoor and his twin sons, Eshan and Kanishk, and sisters Shobha and Smitha were present.
Mani Shankar Aiyar was the only senior politician present
Sunanda was in tears when the ceremony concluded.
When reporters urged him to say a few words before the ceremony, Tharoor quipped, "This is a wedding, no sound byte necessary."
Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar, who attended the wedding with his wife Suneet Vir Singh, was among the first to greet the newly wedded couple.
"We are delighted to see Shashi and Sunanda married," Aiyar said. "We thought this is a moment we should share."
Tharoor will host a reception on Monday
Tharoor's maternal uncle Narayanan Unni and a village elder presided over the ceremony.
Tharoor will host a reception on Monday in Thiruvananthapuram, which he represents in the Lok Sabha.
Tharoor was a good minister
He won the Lok Sabha election from Thiruvananthapuram easily, was appointed a minister of state for external affairs, where he is reported to have done sterling work. He was among the first world leaders to visit Haiti after the earthquake in January.
However, his ministerial career ended abruptly in April following a controversy over his association with the bid for the Kochi IPL team.
This is his third marriage. His first marriage was to Tilottama Mukherjee, an academic who he knew from his school days in Kolkata. Tharoor recently divorced his second wife, Canadian diplomat Christa Giles.
Delhi reception on September 3
The couple also visited the Shirdi Sai Baba temple and the Shani Shingnapur shrine in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district.
The couple will hold a reception at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, where Pushkar is a resident, on August 30, which will be followed by a reception in New Delhi on September 3.
Tharoor's Lok Sabha victory was unprecedented
Never before has anyone not born in the city or not educated here or not proficient in Malayalam registered an electoral victory in the state.
V K Krishna Menon, the former Union defence minister, and K R Narayanan, who later become India's President, claimed electoral victories on the basis of their accomplishments abroad, but they were both born and educated in Kerala and they spoke reasonable Malayalam.