The Wedding Bells Toll

As 2008 rolls in, I look forward to a lot of changes in my life too but the change I'm expectantly dreading is the one that'll change my status from single to married.

After all the nagging I received from home & well-meaning relatives at not being competant enough to find a life-partner myself, I had to give in and let them try to arrange a match for me. However, little did I know what an ordeal it would turn out to be. I had to agree to quite a few silly rituals like having my horoscope prepared and distributed around to various relatives and creating a profile on one of the popular wedding portals on the net.

There were some mundane initial responses to the profile, of course, but, I had over-estimated my worth in the marriage market. After about a week, and numerous rejections later, realisation dawned that the entire process wasn't a walk in the park. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that honesty may not be the best policy in this case. So, I edited my profile to make it more appealing to the average brahmin father of a girl still hanging on to his middle-class values or trying to find a match for his daughter better than the one his wife found over two decades before. After some vital changes to the profile, the number of acceptances to my "expressions of interest" did significantly increase but I wasn't making any further progress, the principle reason being that I wasn't a premium member of the matrimonial website. Not being a paid member meant that I could only send across "expressions of interests" hoping that the other party was a premium member who had paid so that they could contact me. After about six replies to my "expressions of interests", the wedding portal informed me that I could no longer send any more unless I paid to become a premium member.

Four thousand rupees later I got the privileges of personalised "expressions of interest" and a twenty-four word advertisement in a leading south-Indian newspaper. The only difference it made was the number of rejections I got increased though a couple of profiles looked promising.

The first one was from a Bangalore-based girl, whom I'll call AA. I had received a e-mail from her mother asking me to view her profile. Her profile showed her to be a typical South-Indian brahmin girl & with all the values associated with being one. She was into finance & earned over Rs. Six lakhs per annum. I mailed her asking her the password for her photos. She gave it to me also giving me a few more of her personal details like her having one twin sister who was married, the name of the company where she worked etc. I remembered that I had seen the company on one of my friend's list of communities on Orkut. So, I logged on to Orkut, wondering if AA was on Orkut. I found her easy enough and her profile had something interesting too. Her photos on Orkut showed her to be quite different from the photos she had sent me the password to in that she wore glasses, was a bit overweight and her orkut profile had her height a bit shorter too not to mention her drinking habits as a social drinker as opposed to the teetotaller she had mentioned she was in her matrimonial profile. I don't consider myself shallow but somehow the whole thing starting out like this on a basis of deception put me off and I politely declined her proposal.

The second proposal was the girl's mother calling up my mom at home & giving my mom the girl's matrimonial profile no. The girl, VS, was a software engineer working for Infosys in Chennai. She was the first of three sisters. I found her too on the Infosys community in Orkut. Though she didn't have any photos of hers uploaded, the testimonies of her orkut friends & her sister (calling her lazy, a spendthrift etc.) and her choices of communities provided me a great deal of insight into her personality. I didn't bother to mail her any further.

These two incidents made me remove all my personal data from my Orkut profile. I even spruced down the no. of communities I was member of, since, learning from others' mistakes is the best way to learn. Social Networking sites are great to keep in touch with old friends but I also discovered, albeit by chance, that posting of personal data on these sites, might just not be a prudent idea especially if you are not being totally honest in your profile on matrimonial sites.