Netting a Match

A look at two professional women from Chennai who put themselves through the rituals of finding a groom on a matrimonial site

It all began very harmlessly, as most things do. She was healing from heartbreak, in a socially vulnerable state of being a 26-year-old Malayali girl who was still single. She was looking for ways to move on. More immediately, she wanted her father to stop worrying about her marital status. So began Anu Menon’s well-intentioned and open-minded journey through Bharat Matrimony, an online matrimonial site.

Anu is a journalist with an English newspaper in Chennai. She was, then (a year ago) living with her friend, Anita Nair, in a paying guest accommodation just off the beach.

Arranging a marriage has never been more empowered by technology—Anu also discovered that a matrimonial site today looks like a social networking web portal. It lets you chat, see on a pie-chart how active a user is, post videos and voice profiles, and it gives a compatibility index that matches your horoscope with the prospective match.

It even gets down to details such as ancestral origin and choice of cuisine. A range of photographs reveals different looks: traditional, modern, casual. There are RSS feeds and mobile alerts, providing real-time information on interests expressed by potential grooms.

And you can choose from a range of packages: Classic Super, Classic Plus and the plain Classic. Those buying the most expensive package will experience benefits like ‘profile highlighting’ and getting featured at the top of search queries.

Anu didn’t have to fill out her profile. Her father did it for her. The contact email ID on her profile also belongs to her father. But before she could be announced to the seemingly limitless supply of Hindu Nair boys, she had to go through the photoshoot.

The idea of having to pose, guided by the studio guy (who by now knows the drill when it comes to matrimonial website photos), really bothered her for some reason But she did it, grudgingly. Her discomfort must have showed. In his Cochin home, her father was not pleased to see the outcome. Why was she not wearing a potte (bindi)? Why didn’t she have any jewellery on? Why was she looking so tired?

“But that is not me, Anita. I don’t dress like that. I don’t want to pretend to be someone I am not,” she reasoned with her roommate.

In the 21st century, when girls are earning a living in big cities and parents back home are sifting through online matrimonial profiles, the girl gets to meet her prospective grooms unchaperoned, sans ceremony and seemingly rid of tradition, usually in hip urban hangouts.

Anu’s first time was a minor disaster. An impending meeting with a potential husband lay uneasy on the mind. After a long day of not being able to concentrate on her work, she gathered her nerves and took an auto to meet the first candidate. Chosen and arranged by her father, she would meet the software engineer at the beach, by the Gandhi statue.

She went dressed in a cotton salwar kameez, unbothered at not looking her best, nervous to bits at not knowing what to expect. She would tell her roommate later that evening, “The minute I saw him, all I could think about was, ‘how do I get out of this.’” As they walked along the beach, she became ever more aware of the absence of any connection—intellectual or chemical—with this man. “He cracked jokes that I didn’t think were funny. I don’t think I’ve felt lonelier in my life.” She felt as sorry for him as she did for herself. She bought him dinner and told him as politely as she could that this would not work out.

Anu was livid with her father for setting her up with someone who had absolutely nothing in common with her. When she went to Cochin for a holiday, her father escorted her to the most unique cafe she had ever been to: a matrimonial cyber cafe. On entering this crowded cafe, she saw on every computer screen a stream of profiles of brides and grooms, customised to requirements. There were entire families gathered around computer terminals, shortlisting prospective candidates and collaborating on whom to accept and whom to reject.

Anu, embarrassed by the lack of privacy about the whole affair, had to stand across a table and make her choices known to the operator, who then handed over the printouts—Rs 30 per printout. The efficiency and matter-of-fact approach to the selection depressed her.

Back in Chennai, the meeting ritual would continue with similar outcomes. Anu’s roommate Anita Nair, now an equity research editor at a Chennai-based KPO, was no stranger to the travails of being listed on a matrimonial site. Her computer-savvy dad had insisted on uploading her profile on a site. The way Anita saw it, in a social scenario where dating is not the norm, the website for her was an opportunity to meet someone. Besides, her brother had found his wife through a matrimonial portal.

It began happily enough. Her father even hired the services of the Globe Detective Agency for Rs 12,000 to verify the details of a certain infotech professional in the US, with whom Anita had been in touch with for the last six months. A detailed report had arrived confirming his designation, salary and family background. The detective had even followed him around when he came to India.

Parents can’t be too careful nowadays. Conmen who dupe women by posing as grooms on matrimonial sites have hit headlines at regular intervals in Kerala.

But the boy’s pretensions of modernity went up in smoke when his parents put their foot down on the alliance because it was initiated without their knowledge or consent. That, for Anita, was a realisation that she was actually dealing with a deeply traditional setup here.

The divide between who she was and what she was expected to be was becoming more apparent with every proposal she encountered. Her family was thrown into a crisis when she rejected a cardiac surgeon from UK.

Was she out of her mind? How could she hope to do better than that? It was another matter that she and Anu had spent the evening laughing at this cardiac surgeon’s mail to Anita. An 800-word email that began with, “I am a traditional Indian boy waiting to be explored and experienced…” What really miffed Anita was that the only time he mentioned her was to ask for ‘a full-length, colour photo.’

Every time a proposal came, Anita found herself drawn into a bitter exchange with her father, mother and brother. The phone calls would become more frequent, enquiries about when and where she would meet the guy would be demanded, what would she wear—and explanations about why she was not taking it forward would always be dismissed as trivial.

It had come to such a pass that every time Anu would hear Anita losing her temper on the phone, she knew a proposal had come. Anita had been through the ordeal of meeting six guys at least. She had tolerated everything: from one who insisted on bringing his cousin along to a reasonably decent guy who was complaining about a previous meeting with a girl whose father made ten calls to her through the length of their time together. She had by now mastered saying, “This won’t work.”

Anita couldn’t take it anymore. She told her father to delete her profile from the site. That didn’t go down well with her family. Her father was convinced she was emotionally unstable. “Do you want to see a counsellor?” he asked his daughter.

How could a 27-year-old girl not want to get married? How could she be happy on her own? How can she be signing up for guitar classes when she hadn’t found a husband?

She was crying when she called Anu on the phone. “Is something wrong with me? Am I crazy? I don’t know how to explain this, but right now I don’t want to look for a guy. I am quite happy to spend my evenings alone. When I tell this to my father, he tries to change my mind and we end up fighting. All this is just too stressful.”

“Meeting a stranger is just ridiculous, Anu. These are things that should happen naturally. You can’t decide to be friends with someone. I find it extremely difficult to open up to a stranger.” Anita has deleted her profile from the site.

As for Anu, life took a dramatic turn when she was introduced to one of Anita’s colleagues at a play. She now lives with him. He is not a Hindu Nair boy, and unlike other specifications about ‘partner preference’ in her profile, her boyfriend is not a non-drinker.

Anu’s profile is deactivated now. But the proposals continue to pour in. She has four new messages. Her inbox will tell you that she has received 75 proposals. “It is a big lie. You lie about yourself and he lies about himself. And when you meet you realise how badly you miscalculated. I have a serious problem looking for partners based on details like caste or religion, and all the other details that one has no control over.” No amount of technology, she figured, could tell her what she needed to know about a man she would marry.

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