Marriages and destination weddings are the biggest events in the life of both groom and bride. Everyone wants to look their best on their big day.
Especially, girls want to wear unique wedding dresses and look like the most beautiful girl in the universe on this day. Sadly, not all brides, especially in India, can afford a designer wedding dress.
But a man in Kerala is helping those brides out.
A taxi driver based in Thootha village in Malappuram district of Kerala named Nasar Thootha has been running a ‘wedding dress bank’, to help poor girls look beautiful on their wedding day.
He has already helped over 260 underprivileged brides so far by giving them a wedding dress free of cost. Thootha gives out once-used wedding attires – saris, ankle-length skirts and dresses – donated by privileged families to women of limited means.
The 44-year-old who returned from Saudi Arabia used WhatsApp and Facebook to request people to pass on their idle wedding dresses for the cause. Soon, many people donated their wedding dresses and Thootha received dozens of bulky packets arriving on his doorstep, many anonymously.
“Wedding attires are all about vanity. They are worn for a few hours and then never come out of the cupboards. Realising this, many families came forward to support our cause,” Thootha told Al Jazeera.
After receiving these dresses, he dry-cleaned all of them and kept them in airtight packaging. The brides contacted him on Facebook and then visited the bank to choose a dress of their liking. As of now, his dress bank has 800 wedding outfits including sarees, lehenga & dresses fit for Hindu, Muslim and Christian weddings and range from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000.
“With God’s grace, I personally don’t have to invest any money in running the dress bank. I am just a channel through which women who need them most receive them from kind donors,” Thootha said.
Even before this stint, he used to work for state agencies in rehabilitating the poor and homeless.
What a noble work.
