A couple from a village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar came up with a unique idea to make their marriage a memorable event.
Unlike the usual Indian weddings which are more or less a show of pomp and money, Amar and Rani Kamalkar did away with the all the unnecessary extravagance and turned it into an event to collect books. They asked the guests to bring educational books as wedding gifts, News18.com reported. Amar has been associated with social work for last 15 years and runs an NGO called Yuva Chetna. He always dreamed of creating a library of education books for underprivileged children and used his wedding as an opportunity to realise it.
While sending the invites, he clearly said that the guests should only bring books for competitive exams as wedding gifts.
“Competitive exams are hard. But finding the right books for these exams is even harder,” Kamalkar told News18.com.
Indian Express
“A lot of people in rural Maharasthra neither have the means to afford the books, nor the resources to locate them otherwise,” he said. Kamalkar wanted to change that.
Kamalkar’s bride Rani, a professor for Economics at a university in Pune, also approved of Amar’s nobel idea.
Initially, some of their kins were reluctant to agree to ‘strange request’
“Not everyone completely understood why our social work had to be interlinked with our wedding,” Kamalkar said.
On the D-day, over 300 guests turned up with books in their hands. Not only the invitees, even people who were impressed by the couple’s heartfelt gesture came up to bless the couple and contribute.
“We didn’t send out printed wedding invites; we just forwarded the invitation to our friends on WhatsApp. Somehow that got circulated, and people we didn’t know also came forward with books. They found our request unique but substantial, and wanted to contribute,” Amar said.
By the end of the event, the couple collected nearly 3000 books.
The couple is now in the process of building the library at their village that will be operational by the end of June. They also saved a substantial amount of their wedding expense to invest in the library.
Buoyed by the recent experience, the couple is now planning to build another library on their first wedding anniversary.
The couple’s gesture is reminiscent of another wedding event in Guwahati where the couple’s asked guests to donate or buy stationery for specially-abled children of Shishu Sarothi, a non-profit organisation based in the city.
