LIVING in Singapore, the US or Australia... and desperate to hold your wedding in traditional Indian style? Help is just a click away.

IndianWeddingSite.com, which offers such help in the US, receives over 5.2 million hits and over 61,000 visits a month, California-based Ms Sonia Kaur, who started the portal in 2005, told tabla! in an e-mail interview that the idea cropped up when she was planning her own wedding in 2003.

Realising there was very little information online for Indian brides in the US, she began researching ideas and ultimately set up IndianWeddingSite.com “so other couples would be able to find vendors and information needed to plan their own weddings”.

Singapore also has one such site – singaporeindianbrides.blogspot.com is managed by Miss Rosvinder Kaur, a full-time teacher. She used to help her friends plan their weddings and found it frustrating that there were no online resources for local Indian brides. That made her start the website.

“There was a forum for Singapore brides but it was very Western-centric,” she said.

She set up the site in March this year to help brides source for vendors when planning their wedding. Miss Kaur, 27, who is getting married next year, told tabla! that she wanted to make her site a one-stop place, essentially built by Indian brides.

“All the listings here are based on word-of-mouth – recommended by brides who have used the vendors and have given their feedback,” she said.

Her website lists caterers, henna artistes, bridal boutiques and information on where to get bridal door gifts. MissKaur claims she only charges vendors a nominal fee, just to keep her website going. Her site gets about 30 unique visitors a day.
MrsUrvashi Sood, 50, who runs the Ambassador Hotel Services, said that she and her daughter relied heavily on the Internet to plan her daughter’s wedding.

“The Internet offered us an avenue to search for the best choices available for venues and the services we required.

“In the later stages of firming up logistics, the Internet was crucial for keeping in touch with the vendors quickly and efficiently through e-mail,” she said.

She believes online wedding sites serve as a useful gauge for what is available in the international wedding market and “allows Indians living outside India to stay in touch with their roots”.

However, if there is one area where Indian brides and grooms might not be so traditional, it is in their choice of wedding attire.

Indian couturier Rohit Bal, who was in Singapore to showcase his couture line at the Living In Style 2009 at Keppel Island on Sept 22, moaned that the fashion trend now among Indian couples is Indo-Western. He told tabla!: “Especially in India, they are looking for designs that are contemporary which fuses some tradition. They really don’t know what they want. I love tradition and I wish they would go back to that.”