#DilliWaliShaadi trend alert: Sync to sizzling Bollywood numbers, frame frame

Picture a typical #DilliWaliShaadi and your visuals will have no dearth of dhoom dhadaka with lots of Bollywood-style dancing. But, what’s new about #TeamBride shaking a leg to Bollywood songs at the sangeet ceremony or #DulheWale flaunting photos from a pre-wedding shoot? It’s the couples who are seizing the screen-time recreating filmi chartbusters for videos, which are recorded and screened during the wedding functions. Delhi-based Karan and Sakshi Ahuja (left) recreated Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif’s Bang Bang music video (right) for the former’s wedding last month. The most popular attempt at this is the recent Bang Bang pre-wedding video — originally ft Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif — which has so far amassed 195k views on Instagram! Delhiite Karan Ahuja, who is featured in this video, says, “Sakshi (my then fiancé, now wife) wanted to shoot the video around two years before we got married (last month) because she’s absolutely fascinated this song. We wanted to create something entertaining and challenging, which has a bit of romantic angle to make it a perfect pre-wedding shoot. The song Bang Bang has it all and even the oomph, which made us select and recreate it frame frame,” recalls Ahuja, whose video took Insta storm and even compelled actor Hrithik Roshan to comment: “Beautiful, congratulations guys!” “When we saw Hrithik’s comment, that moment was surreal for us,” says Anubhav Sharma from The Stagelife Wedding, who shot the Bang Bang video. Sharma. He adds, “Gone are the days when Indian weddings were just about the bride and groom performing a couple’s dance. Most couples today want to show their love and life on the screen, and Bollywood helps us achieve that. The recordings are thus intimate, classy, and massy – all at the same time… Why couples are preferring to record these videos? Because as photographers and filmmakers, we make the couple feel like stars!” Vikhyat Gulati and Shweta Guliani (left) played AP Dhillon and Banita Sandhu (right) in their version of With You. Romance is certainly one emotion that takes precedence when it comes to such pre-wedding song videos. “Recently, we recreated AP Dhillon and Banita Sandhu’s video With You with a real life couple – Vikhyat Gulati and Shweta Guliani,” shares Ayush Agrawal, from Photomurals Ayush, adding, “Among the ones that I have recently shot, I enjoyed recording the very down-to-earth and intimate music videos based on Prateek Kuhad’s music. To a large extent, for the to-be wed couples it’s like being in a movie where the song has a situation and they play the main character, to later watch themselves on the big screen with their entire clan.” The reason for hopping onto the bandwagon is also the pressure of entertaining the wedding guests. Ahuja confesses, “I wouldn’t deny that we did feel a dinct pressure… Usually, couples end up booking artes who perform live, but we felt that that steals the spotlight away from the couple. For our wedding, we wanted the limelight to be on us. But that’s only possible when we do something different or hatke.” The song Baba Bolta Hain Bas Ho Gaya (inset) was recreated brothers Dawood and Hasan Ahmed. The craze for such videos is such that the couple’s families are also partaking in the new trend, and enjoying the social media users’ reactions. Take for instance, Delhi-based Dawood Ahmed and Zia Masood. “My brother Hasan decided to stage my love story at our sangeet, role playing me,” says Ahmed. Towards the end of this live performance was the song Baba Bolta Hai from Sanju (2018), which featured the two brother showing the camaraderie between actors Ranbir Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt in the OG song. “We decided to go the Sanju baba way because like how Ranbir portrayed Sanjay Dutt in the latter’s biopic, my brother played me in the film based on my life before my wedding. Starting from the costumes to the set and dubbing, everything was to the T, which made our guests say ‘Wow’!”