Who said a business school trip has to be all work and no play? For Karishma Patel, a Columbia Business School visit would quietly set the stage for something far more enduring. A blind date arranged by mutual friends, one of whom had crossed paths with Vikram Saini at Bucknell University, brought the two together in August 2022. The connection was immediate. “We hit it off instantly,” recalled Karishma, who was studying at Columbia at the time. Vikram was just as certain. “After meeting her, I went straight to dinner with my family and cousins and spent the whole evening talking about her,” he said of their first afternoon together.
Now based in Brooklyn, New York, the couple found themselves aligned on more than geography, bonding over shared sensibilities and an easy familiarity. The proposal followed in the second week of December, during a trip to the Caribbean. On the morning of Friday the 13th, Vikram asked Karishma to marry him on a quiet walk overlooking the bay at Rosewood Little Dix Bay in Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands, understated and entirely their own. They chose to marry on 31 October, 2024, a date the couple sums up simply: you make your own luck.
The vision
Parvez Taufiq
Rooted in tradition but shaped by the couple’s lives abroad, Karishma and Vikram’s wedding vision was an exercise in balance. “He’s Punjabi and I’m Gujarati, we wanted to keep it traditional and maintain our heritage,” shared Karishma, while also making space for the western sensibilities that come from growing up in the US. With a deliberately intimate guest list of 305, “a good mix of cousins, friends and family,” as Vikram put it, the couple prioritised connection over scaling the wedding. Portugal emerged as the natural choice: equidistant enough from India and the US to keep logistics uncomplicated, and just removed enough to turn the wedding into a rather out-of-the-ordinary celebration.
The destination
Parvez Taufiq
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