Now that I have decided to not sit behind an anonymous handle and 99% of the readers know me personally, here is something that we do not discuss enough.
The failure of matrimony sites, at least with reference to the Desi community. To their credit, the sites have a lot of Indianized features, but the problem is with the person sitting behind the wheel.
It started like a mid 80’s bollywood movie; my parents decided that it was time for me to get “settledâ€. A family friend with a cute daughter at a cousin’s wedding and after two long years, I still do not see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When that did not work, their research led them to these websites that they could use. Being tech friendly, they put up a profile and voila, I was the hottest thing to hit the market since Rajnikanth, (or so they thought). A couple of weeks later, they were communicating with a zillion South Indian Tamil Iyer Brahmins from all over the world. It got to a point that every day, where I had to read through the list of women my dad had forwarded before I could check my security logs and make sure that my servers were not being hacked.
“Yenda Karthiee, What else do you want? She is educated, smart, successful and comes from a very good family… “ Try hearing that every time you talk to your parents for about six months and every time they spoke about any girl. In the end they did not care, they just wanted me settled.
Over the past two years, I have figured a few things out. Fell free to agree or disagree in the comments section below. The problem is more with the parents than with any one else who might be involved in the equation.
Indian parents do not know the first thing about communicating on the Internet. When most sites allow you to type up the entire Ramayana twice over with space left for translations in 20 different languages, you get five lines to decipher, decode and come to a conclusion on if you want to spend the rest of your life with this person.
And until you are cleared by the parents, the uncle, aunt, kid sister, the smelly brother and the family pet, you do not get to talk to the girl or write to her. Even if you do, they want to know what you think about her as soon as she has hit the send button replying to your “Just wanted to say Hi†email.
Another thing that I never get is “What high school did your son go to?†question. All this while the girl is always described as “a very well educated girl from a prestigious universityâ€. Let me get this right, she is like every other Indian person I know. Hmmm how nice, Please don’t use prestigious, because it means a different thing for the people who are sitting in this country.
If I designed tools for one of these sites, I would be jumping off of the Golden gate bridge, with a huge piece of rock tied to my neck. Starting with spell check and moving on to using the BCC function when they email, the tools were created for a reason. I do not have a problem with you saving time, but my address in the mass email not only shows me how important I am, but also shows how much you care about the process. “We are impressed with the background of your family,†to ten different people, says it all.
Sticking to their traditional roots, people never tell you if they liked what they saw or otherwise. Most parents stop responding and replying after exchanging the first few emails. You do not know if they ceased to exist or if they are just not interested. If you do not think that this is going to work, let me know, that way, I strike you off of my list. And NO, passport photos do not qualify, not unless, I am a cyber investigator trying to match mug shots.
Atleast this is not a passport picture.
So I made up my mind, no communication with parents. They just do not understand how things work and I am not spending any more time writing about this, but then again, I could start a site where parents could be banned from communicating. Hmmm…
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