Before Shyla Raghav and Pranav Yadav began discussing flowers, fabrics or food for their wedding in Rajasthan, they were already thinking about what the celebration would leave behind. At a 235-year-old fort in the Aravalli landscape, working with Pataka Events and Mohr Conscious Celebration, they planned a wedding that stayed close to the materials, architecture and setting already around them. Locally sourced flowers, reclaimed wood, block-printed fabrics, recycled paper, glass bottles and composting were worked into the planning from the start.
That approach did not make the celebrations spare. Guests customised lac bangles at the mehendi, listened to Punjabi folk songs by Mahima Gupta, watched Yadav enter in a 1933 Ford Model B and with five girls joining the baraat in place of a traditional male sarbala. On the Qawwali night, fresh mogra was tied to guests’ wrists before Nizami Bandhu performed on the Nazaara Terrace overlooking the village. Sustainability sat inside the experience, through materials, food, favours, flowers and the couple’s final act of Seva at a local girls’ school.
For Raghav, Chief Impact Officer at TIME and a board member of the Global Fashion Agenda, climate and biodiversity have been central to her life, including through work with the UNFCCC, Conservation International, the World Bank, UNDP and TIME CO2. Yadav, founder and CEO of Neuro-Insight, works at the intersection of neuroscience, human motivation and creativity. Their wedding drew from those backgrounds, though the result was never meant to feel like a statement. It was a celebration planned by two people who cared deeply about how things were made, where they came from and what remained after the guests went home.
The couple first met at a TIME 100 Next event in New York. Yadav was seated with his back to the stage when he heard Raghav speak about the geopolitics of sustainability. “I couldn’t place her,” he remembers. “I couldn’t figure out the worldview that allowed someone to frame an idea the way she did.” Raghav, who had recently moved to New York after years in Washington DC, remembers the city feeling difficult and unfamiliar at the time. Meeting Yadav, she says, felt “like the city giving something back.” They became close friends and found themselves in each other’s company week after week, until the possibility of losing that closeness made the relationship impossible to misname.
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