When Life Imitates Art Sakshi Salve

Welcoming hello! Into her lovely home, the young author of the great indian wedding and bride-to-be, shares her love story and her love of story telling. In her case, fiction and reality meet... And how!

- Radha Jetley

No city takes its weddings as seriously as Delhi and few celebrate as the quintessential Dilliwallas do. This is a city where the party season lasts six months of the year and families ceremoniously flock to designer studios for those rare and exquisite wedding ensembles. As the vivacious Sakshi Salve, author of novel The Big Indian Wedding invites HELLO! into her family home in the capital, we realise what makes today more special than other days, is that she is serendipitously one step closer to planning her own wedding! Their beautiful home definitely reveals a couple whose aesthetics respect an old-world charm, and just as we observe this, her dapper fiancé, Delhi based, Karan Bedi, stops by to say “hi.” The dynamic entrepreneur is the CEO of Eros Labs, a technology incubator that creates and funds early stage technology ventures, whose incubees include companies in healthcare, e-commerce and content. Today, he is all smiles and mischief around his beau.

Sakshi explains how her own professional journey, into writing and entertainment, was a natural course of direction. “I have never been normal. Ask my family or friends and they will tell you. I was always the crazy one with the oneliners making everyone laugh till their eyes filled with tears. When I was one, I would perform (in my diaper) for guests who came over. I’ve loved dancing and singing for people from a very young age and was never shy of speaking in public situations. In fact being on stage with a thousand people looking at me, expecting something, is the greatest high I have ever experienced.”

This is most apparent in singer Kanika Kapoor’s music for her single, Teddy Bear where a bold and confident Ms Salve appears alongside her, looking no less skilled with her dance moves than the star performer herself. But why did she choose to focus on weddings specifically as a subject matter for her debut book?