It would take either
knowledge of Western culture or an American upbringing
to understand that Shanto’s profile is tongue-in-cheek.
He’s banking on it to filter out the people
from India who, perhaps, simply want to marry their
daughters off to an American.
There’s more to filling out a Shaadi.com
profile than just having a few sentences about yourself.
It can take nearly an hour to fill out all of the details
in your profile, starting with who posted the profile
(self, parents, sibling, friend or other). Shaadi.com
estimates that about 25 percent of its customers have
parents or siblings posting profiles for them, while nearly
60 percent of people post their own profiles. The rest
of the profiles are submitted by friends.
Another question, prominently placed
toward the beginning of the profile, stipulates blood
type.
“You should not marry in the
same blood group,” says Subramania Sitaraman,
echoing one South Asian attitude. “The children
may not be well-formed.”
While there is no scientific evidence of this, Sitaraman says there
are still people who believe that everyone comes from one of seven
“family lines” and should not marry someone from the
same line.
Sitaraman is an Indian native in
the U.S. working as a marketing professor in Ohio.
He’s also the contact person for a matrimonial
ad placed in India Abroad, a weekly Indian
newspaper for Indians in the Western Hemisphere. His
friend is looking for a husband for their daughter,
a 26-year-old living in New Delhi. The ad reads:
“We are looking for a boy who is brilliant,
ambitious, highly talented, tall, vegetarian, well-educated,
preferably from an Ivy League or other leading universities
of U.S.A. and from a respected family settled in India.
The boy should have plans to settle down in India
soon, although for a few years our daughter can join
the boy in the U.S. Our daughter is very caring and
a perfect blend of East and West.”
As the designated U.S. contact person, it’s Sitaraman’s
job to sort through the various responses the family’s daughter
receives and narrow down the 50 to 100 applicants to about 10. But
he said he’s probably just the “second line of defense”
and is sure the girl’s family is also looking for a potential
mate for their daughter in other venues.
Even with the development of matrimonial
sites like Shaadi.com, newspaper matrimonial ads—the
older way of finding mates—are still popular,
Sitaraman says. The Times of India, the Hindustan
Times and other India-based newspapers carry
four to five pages of matrimonial ads on Sundays.
Still, newspaper matrimonial ads are more limited
and more expensive than online matrimonial websites.
India Abroad charges $30 for a 10-word ad,
with each additional word costing $3. The ads run
in cities where the paper has its local editions:
New York, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto and Los Angeles.
Sitaraman himself had an arranged marriage back in 1965, when many
marriage matches were made by word-of-mouth through families and
family friends.
“My relations told me, ‘There is a girl,’”
he says. “I told my parents one thing: I’ll go and see
the girl only once. If you’re happy and satisfied then I’ll
go. I’ll never do the crime of going and seeing a girl and
then rejecting her.”
Sitaraman thinks the notion that an arranged marriage means forcing
children to marry is misguided. Instead, an arranged marriage of
his day is comparable to using a matrimonial website today; parents
and children come together to make a decision about unifying two
families together.
“In my day I could not think of marrying without my parents’
consent,” Sitaraman says. “Because it’s not done.
They would feel bad or hurt.”
He said in America, more and more young South Asians are looking
for mates on their own instead of having parents find them and ask
their parents for approval later.
“[The] Indian system and American system
is totally different,” he says. “In [the]
American system, they’re independent. The parents
do not say anything. In the heart of hearts, they
still carry the Indian baggage.”
But some South Asians, like Shanto, don’t call their desire
for parental approval of their future mates “baggage”
but “family values.” Perhaps the way his parents’
generation met their spouses may be different from the way his generation
does, but Shanto believes one thing is still the same: when two
people are married, their families have to get along.
One of Shanto’s good friends
from California is Sejal, 27, who has her Master’s
in nursing and is Jain. People who practice Jainism
are strict vegetarians, and this was something Sejal
hoped to find in her future husband. She met her husband
Neal on Shaadi.com.
“I wanted someone who was Indian, someone who was Jain, someone
who doesn’t eat meat, someone who is sweet and cares about
other people,” she says.
Sejal did, however, need a little bit of a push from her parents
to find a husband. She first began attending conferences for Jain
youth that happen every summer, trying to find a husband while she
was in her early 20s. The conferences last a few days and offer
activities for Jain Americans from the ages of 15 to 30. For the
children who are too young to be thinking about getting married,
there are panels on religion and culture. For those who are looking
for a spouse, there are icebreaker events: mixers for people to
come together, talk and exchange numbers. But Sejal didn’t
have any luck at the conferences.
“I wasn’t ready,” she says. “I
was more networking and finding friends instead. My
parents were like, ‘This isn’t working.’”
So, at the insistence of her dad, Sejal’s sister created
a profile for Sejal on Shaadi.com when she turned 25. Neal was across
the country in Maryland finishing up medical school and expressed
interest in her. They emailed each other for two or three weeks.
One month later, he came to visit her in California. A few months
after the visit, Sejal’s parents met Neal, and six months
after their first meeting they were engaged. They remained engaged
for a longer time than their “dating” period.
Sejal, like Shanto, justifies a short dating period by comparing
divorce rates in America to the rates in India.
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