The subscription card.

For a full wedding, twelve to eighteen months is ideal — and for a palace or a destination, longer still. The best dates fall on a handful of muhurats each season, and the best venues and vendors are booked against them a year or more in advance. So the honest answer is: as soon as the families have agreed it is us you want. We take a deliberately small number of weddings each year and close each season when it is full.

Our columns begin at ₹4.5 lakh for last-month coordination and rise from there; full planning typically starts around ₹40 lakh of our fee, with destination commissions from ₹1 crore. Those are our planning fees, separate from the wedding budget itself, which at this level usually runs from a few crore upward. More useful than any number is an honest conversation early — we would rather tell you straight away whether we are the right gharana for your family than have you find out later.

Constantly. Much of each Patrika is staged away from home — Udaipur and Jaipur, Goa and the Kerala backwaters, Hyderabad's old palaces, a rajbari in Kolkata — and a good deal of it abroad, for diaspora families marrying back into India or far from it. We carry trusted local vendors, fixers, and permissions in the places we work most, and we survey any venue in person before we commit to it.

Yes — that is exactly what the column On Celebration is for. We step in four to six weeks out, learn everything the family has built, confirm and brief every vendor from the halwai to the dhol, sequence the functions, and run each day so that you can be a guest at your own wedding. It is the most-requested service we offer.

Always — it is the whole point. We have staged Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian weddings, North and South, and weddings that marry two traditions into one. We work with your priest, your qazi, your granthi, your family's elders and their non-negotiables. We never flatten a custom to make it photograph better. The ritual leads; the design serves it.

A point of view. We are not the gharana for the biggest wedding, or the one with the most drones over the sangeet. We are the gharana for the wedding that could only have belonged to your two families, in your place, this once. If you can tell us, in a sentence, how you want it to feel at the vidaai, we will know how to make the rest.

We reply to every enquiry ourselves, usually within two working days. If it feels like a fit, we meet — at the studio in Sunder Nagar, or over a call for families abroad — to talk through your wedding, your budget, your dates, and which column suits you. No pressure, no template. Just the beginning of a conversation we take seriously.