She found her planner on a layover in Mumbai, and gained a friend for life

When Singapore-based Aanchal and Shaswat started planning their wedding, she did what any Google Sheets devotee would. She built a spreadsheet. It listed hotels, mostly in India, with room counts, capacities and one very important question: did it have a beach?

Aanchal grew up in Kathmandu, and to her parents’ dismay, she did not want to get married in the landlocked, beachless capital city of Nepal. However, once she locked her spreadsheet, it told her exactly what her dad had been saying for months. A wedding isn’t just a hotel that can hold your guests. It’s the whole world you build around it, and with their families and networks, Kathmandu made the most sense.

It would be a multi-day Hindu wedding in November, with pre-functions for around three hundred guests, and open pheras in the afternoon that nearly eight hundred people were expected to attend.

That left one problem. Aanchal had a grand vision, and she wasn’t quite sure any of the planners in Nepal would be able to execute it. Luckily, she found the perfect team – Doli Diary – three ways at once.

First, they came up at the top of a Google search. Then a friend of a friend recommended them. And finally, on a layover in Mumbai, by pure chance, she met Neha, one of the founders. They clicked immediately. Somewhere in that first conversation, Neha said she loved Google Sheets too.

And that sealed the deal. Aanchal had found her planner.

Her dad was initially skeptical. Doli Diary had never done a wedding in Nepal, and he would have preferred someone who had. But Aanchal convinced him, and her family helped with the rest. Her brother had married in Nepal a few years earlier, so they knew the local vendors, and they lined up meetings for Neha and her co-founder Jinal on their very first visit.

What followed felt less like hiring a planner and more like a friendship. Neha and Jinal began with a personality test, and used it to recommend photographers and artists who suited the couple, instead of simply recommending people they knew. They ran clear workstreams, with one leading planning and hospitality while the other led design. There was transparency about fees, commissions and their team’s travel costs from day one. And when the graphic designer nearly walked away after one revision too many, Neha smoothed it over. More than one planning visit to Kathmandu ended with Aanchal and her planners winding down in Thamel at her favorite local bars.

Neha and Jinal were just as protective of Aanchal’s budget. Their designer built a cost sheet for every design element and went through the local production quotes item by item. If a price didn’t make sense, she had a contact in India who could rent the same piece for less, or make it from scratch. When the photographer came in above budget, the planners negotiated the rate down.

They even acted as sounding boards for Aanchal, helping her decide where to splurge and where to hold back. Photography was non-negotiable, while local artists could step in instead of a band from India on nights when guests would be winding down themselves. When you need to make a hundred tiny decisions, having people in your corner to give you sane advice is worth more than any spreadsheet.

What followed felt less like hiring a planner and more like a friendship.

Even the best planners can’t plan for everything, though.

The wedding fell in the same week as Nepal’s election. Forty-eight hours before it began, the border with India was sealed, and a fifth of the decor and furniture coming from India never made it across. Election week also meant a dry day, so nobody knew whether the bar could open at all. The DJ, hired for his crowd-lifting energy, twisted his ankle checking into the hotel. And on the first night, the police turned up at nine to enforce election-period noise rules, just as the band hit its rhythm.

Any one of these would rattle a planner, and more so one who hadn’t worked in the city before. Neha and her team simply rolled with it. They reworked the decor with what they had. The DJ played his entire set from a chair, hyping the crowd on the mic. When the band had to stop, everyone moved to the after-party and kept dancing.

The part that mattered most came on the wedding day itself. Neha and her team took Aanchal and Shaswat out of every planning WhatsApp group.

For a bride with a master sheet, that is a big ask. Leaving the groups meant letting go of the numbers, the updates and the fires. She did it anyway, because Neha and Jinal had earned that kind of trust. Whatever was happening behind the scenes, the two of them could simply be at their own wedding.

Four years on, they are still friends. They follow each other on Instagram, and whenever they end up in the same city, they make the effort to meet. Aanchal still messages Neha for recommendations. Neha still asks before she shares Aanchal’s number with another bride.

Aanchal did not get her beach. But maybe that was never the column that mattered. What she got instead was a planner who is still in her corner, long after the last guest has gone home.