You've gotta love that India has a 'wedding season'. I like that - take a social concept and elevate it to the level of seasonality.

What's perhaps less loveable is the never-endingness of these weddings in the flesh. It's taken us a while, but we've finally worked out why we can't sleep at night due to firecrackers going off every evening and why loudspeakers are pumping while there's drumming and dancing and chanting.

Lying sleepless in our beds in Jodhpur was the most extreme instance of wedding fever yet. The only analogy that I can think of for the noise-level that night is this:

Imagine the largest snare-drum you can (perhaps the size of, say ... a bus). Then imagine being INSIDE that snare drum, trapped just under the taut skin.

The reverberating drumming sound is THAT loud.

The whole shebang is pretty cool at street level, where there's a swirling parade of people picking their way down the narrow streets. The groom is up on a horse, swathed in an entire body-armour of white flowers and red roses, which is amazing to behold. The wedding party is walking in a rough procession formation, and they're flanked by rows of children who are carrying strings of live electrical wiring in the form of fairylights. Then comes a woooden cart with some dudes pushing a mobile electricity generator. There's also an obligatory auto-rickshaw that's sporting five or so huge megaphones and some amplifiers.

Twenty-four Hour Party People had NOTHING on this scene.