Lucknow: Remember Anushka Sharma’s second outing in a Bollywood film as Shruti Kakkar, the Wedding Planner?
This movie must have inspired many young Indian girls to follow in Shruti’ path and become wedding planners too. May be Devika Narain of Lucknow was among them.
This girl wanted to be a journalist earlier but then changed the course of her career to venture into field of Event Management, specially weddings.
Little must she have guessed then that one day she would get to plan the wedding of Anuskha and Virat, that too in far away Italy?
India cricket captain Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma’s much talked about wedding ceremony has this Lucknow connection of Devika Narain, a city girl, It was Devika’s design to place the wedding at Borgo Finocchieto in Buonconvento, a village in Italy’s Siena. Her husband Joseph Radhik was the designated photographer for the wedding.
Devika Narain’s father Pradeep, said it was Devika’s wedding planning company — Devika Narain and Company that designed Sharma and Kohli’s wedding. “We’ve been keeping a secret for a couple of months now and all of it has come to life today, in a beautiful Tuscan village, where Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma official got married,” said a Facebook post on Devika’s company’s profile.
The post goes on to say
“The past few weeks have been absolutely surreal and as we sit typing this out, it’s sort of settling in! Four months of keeping a secret, hiding even from our own team, the secret recces, midnight meetings, vague conversations, and sleepless nights have finally manifested into this grand moment. Thank you Anuskha and Virat, for making us part of your family and trusting us to pull off something of this magnitude. You believed in us, even on those sleepless nights that we didn’t! A huge shout out to everyone who stood with us through this and created magic all along the way – ”
A well kept secret
Devika’s family said she kept her assignment a secret. They found out about the wedding with the rest of the world on Monday evening, even though she made frequent trips to Italy.
“In recent past Devika made frequent trips to Italy. But, she never disclosed it to us. Sometimes she said she was traveling to Rome, sometimes to Paris. It was only on Monday evening, when she broke the news to her grandmother confirming that they designed the grand wedding that we came to know about it,” said Pradeep, a local promoter of SPIC MACAY, an organisation that promotes Indian culture, arts and music among the youth.
Devika had planned to be a journalist
After completing her schooling from Loreto Convent Intermediate College, Lucknow in 2006, Devika went to Lady Shri Ram College and did English honours.
She then wanted to become a journalist.
But she changed her mind and joined the country’s most prominent wedding planning company where she worked for three years before setting up her own business around four years back.
‘Devika Narain and Company was born on the dining table of a small rented apartment with simple goal of creating spaces that were personal and uniquely Indian’— reads the intro of Devika’s company on the website.
She soon married Radhik, an award winning photographer.
Apart from the Virushka wedding, as it is being called, Devika planned other celebrity marriages that includes Indian cricketers Robin Venu Uthappa, Dinesh Karthik and others.
Now we know who is responsible for that fairy tale setting in rusty Tuscan dwelling, the humble bhangra dancers and the small, intimate gathering of relatives and friends.
They would have managed to keep it a total secret too, but for the sight and news of the Sharma Pundit ( priest) seen boarding an international flight right after her parents had left for Italy!
