There comes a time in every Indian man's life when everyone around him, from his parents to his neighbor's dog, is worried about finding him the right girl. My time started when I turned 28. I was living far away from home in a small town in Ohio, USA. This worked in my favor by keeping me away from where the action was.
However, that did not stop my parents to start their "process". The "process" is nothing but a series of steps taken by Indian parents to ensure that their son/daughter gets the best spouse available in the market. Here are the steps
1. Advertisement
There is always one relative in the family who wants everyone over the age of 25 to get married. This particular relative has the powers to find a single boy/girl who belongs to the same community from anywhere in the country. Sometimes I wonder if such people have anything else to do at all. This relative will always be after the parents of any eligible bachelor/bachelorette asking them whether their child is ready to get married. The advertisement stage begins when the parents would give this relative the green light to proceed with their search. Then the wheels start churning and your profile (Photo, Education Details, Horoscope and a bunch of lies) would be circulated within your community. Your details would have reached far and wide without your knowledge. You might find your details on online matrimony sites, community magazines, newspapers etc. An utter breach of your privacy, but hey! it is India, nothing is ever private.
2. Filtration
This is quite a busy stage for the parents. Depending on the qualifications of the person, the responses to the advertisement would vary. Some parents spend days without getting a single response. In other cases, parents are inundated with responses. That's when the filtration begins. In most cases, following are the criteria used to filter out the responses
a. Appearance (Fair skinned yes, yes, yes. Dark complexion, let's think about this later)
b. Education Qualification
c. Family History/Background
Parents would filter out a much smaller list of prospects before informing their children. To do this, they would use all their connections (relatives, friends, detectives etc.) to find everything about those prospects and their families. Unfortunately, the person getting married is not involved in this stage and probably has no idea what is going on.
3. Meetings
Once the list has been confirmed, parents of each of the prospect are contacted. The two parents would end up talking about each others family and background. They would then decide on a location and time for the boy and girl to meet.
The setting up of the meeting ends the process for the parents. Now they go back to their respective children and disclose this master plan. The poor kids then swallow their shock and go and meet each other. The meetings are usually not more than an hour or two and are really awkward. However, when the kids return home, they are expected to decide on marriage. So on an average, a kid gets an hour to decide "Yes! I would want to spend the rest of my life with that person.". Imagine the pressure on those poor kids.
Back to my story, my parents did go through their "process" and did send me contact details for a few girls. Luckily, my parents are very liberal. I had made it very clear to them that if I am going through with this, I will not be talking to more than one girl at a given time. I had also told them that I need to know the person well before agreeing to get married. Reluctantly they agreed. Also, living on a different continent helped me a lot to do this on my terms.
For a whole year, I was able to avoid making a decision on marriage. I could sense that my parents were getting anxious but I was glad that they did not pressure me. As a result, I spoke to 3 or 4 girls, told them right away, I am not ready for marriage and they ended up becoming good friends. A close friend was getting married in January 2015 in India. I did not tell my parents that I would be flying down to India for the wedding hoping that I would catch them off guard and by the time they setup something I would be flying back to the US.
So as per my plan, I reached Mumbai at 1 AM on 10th of January and headed straight home. I woke up my parents in the middle of the night. They were shocked to see me there. After the excitement died down, we all went to bed. Next morning, I woke up around 8. Breakfast was served, and I was gorging on some awesome food when my mom told me, I have a meeting setup at 11 to meet this girl. I froze with shock. How could she have arranged all of this in such a short time? I was utterly baffled on the surface but deep down I was impressed by the efficiency and determination of my parents. That was checkmate for me, I couldn't run anywhere. Maybe it was the tiredness or jet lag, but I couldn't think of any reason to get out of that meeting. So I agreed and I met this girl. She was nice but I didn't find her interesting enough to continue talking to her. So I told my parents this wouldn't work. They were like, that's alright, we already have another meeting setup for next week. Boy! they are professionals.
So a week later, my mom and I rode an hour in a auto rickshaw to meet this family from Pune who had come down to Mumbai for a wedding. Their contingent had 6 people. The girl was accompanied by her parents, her dad's brother and his wife and her mom's brother. On my end, it was just my mom and I. The girl had a very cute and bright smile. She was very simple yet I could see a mischievous tinkle in her eyes. Due to the large gathering, I could only talk to her for 5 minutes. I ended up talking to her dad for most of the time. It was so awkward to talk to her with all these people sitting right next to us. I ended up asking some stupid questions about work. Thank God she worked in Information Technology. That gave me something to talk about. The whole group chatted for about an hour before dispersing. On my way home, my mom asked me the usual question "So, what do you think about her?" I told her that I found this girl cute and I would like to know her better. I eventually decided to marry this girl. Her name is Vibha.
Luckily, my family had to go to Pune to attend a wedding the next week. My mom used this opportunity to setup a meeting with Vibha. This time I was able to take her away from everyone else. We stood by the food (Chaat) stall at the wedding and spoke for a while. The more I spoke to her, the more interested I was in her. She was so different from all the other girls in my life. She was simple, naïve yet feisty and mischievous. I was intrigued. I was supposed to fly back the next day so I told her lets spend some time knowing each other before deciding about marriage. She agreed and I headed back with the image of her smiling face.
Next day, I flew by to the US and our long distance phone calls began. We spoke almost every day. She looked at things in a completely different way. I loved that about her. In a month I decided that I was ready to marry Vibha. It has been 6 months since I have known her and every day I like her more. My whole family has met her and they adore her. Before meeting her, I had this absurd list of things I would have liked in my "perfect" girl. I call that list absurd because looking back, I feel I was so immature to have such a list. With Vibha, I didn't have to think or analyze. It felt so normal to say, "Yes I want to spend the rest of my life with you". Usually, I would choke due to fear of commitment. But there is something special about Vibha that just made this decision super easy. In the end, I know we do have a long life ahead of us and we have to work together in making it successful, but with Vibha on my side, I have a real good feeling about the rest of my life.
However, that did not stop my parents to start their "process". The "process" is nothing but a series of steps taken by Indian parents to ensure that their son/daughter gets the best spouse available in the market. Here are the steps
1. Advertisement
There is always one relative in the family who wants everyone over the age of 25 to get married. This particular relative has the powers to find a single boy/girl who belongs to the same community from anywhere in the country. Sometimes I wonder if such people have anything else to do at all. This relative will always be after the parents of any eligible bachelor/bachelorette asking them whether their child is ready to get married. The advertisement stage begins when the parents would give this relative the green light to proceed with their search. Then the wheels start churning and your profile (Photo, Education Details, Horoscope and a bunch of lies) would be circulated within your community. Your details would have reached far and wide without your knowledge. You might find your details on online matrimony sites, community magazines, newspapers etc. An utter breach of your privacy, but hey! it is India, nothing is ever private.
2. Filtration
This is quite a busy stage for the parents. Depending on the qualifications of the person, the responses to the advertisement would vary. Some parents spend days without getting a single response. In other cases, parents are inundated with responses. That's when the filtration begins. In most cases, following are the criteria used to filter out the responses
a. Appearance (Fair skinned yes, yes, yes. Dark complexion, let's think about this later)
b. Education Qualification
c. Family History/Background
Parents would filter out a much smaller list of prospects before informing their children. To do this, they would use all their connections (relatives, friends, detectives etc.) to find everything about those prospects and their families. Unfortunately, the person getting married is not involved in this stage and probably has no idea what is going on.
3. Meetings
Once the list has been confirmed, parents of each of the prospect are contacted. The two parents would end up talking about each others family and background. They would then decide on a location and time for the boy and girl to meet.
The setting up of the meeting ends the process for the parents. Now they go back to their respective children and disclose this master plan. The poor kids then swallow their shock and go and meet each other. The meetings are usually not more than an hour or two and are really awkward. However, when the kids return home, they are expected to decide on marriage. So on an average, a kid gets an hour to decide "Yes! I would want to spend the rest of my life with that person.". Imagine the pressure on those poor kids.
Back to my story, my parents did go through their "process" and did send me contact details for a few girls. Luckily, my parents are very liberal. I had made it very clear to them that if I am going through with this, I will not be talking to more than one girl at a given time. I had also told them that I need to know the person well before agreeing to get married. Reluctantly they agreed. Also, living on a different continent helped me a lot to do this on my terms.
For a whole year, I was able to avoid making a decision on marriage. I could sense that my parents were getting anxious but I was glad that they did not pressure me. As a result, I spoke to 3 or 4 girls, told them right away, I am not ready for marriage and they ended up becoming good friends. A close friend was getting married in January 2015 in India. I did not tell my parents that I would be flying down to India for the wedding hoping that I would catch them off guard and by the time they setup something I would be flying back to the US.
So as per my plan, I reached Mumbai at 1 AM on 10th of January and headed straight home. I woke up my parents in the middle of the night. They were shocked to see me there. After the excitement died down, we all went to bed. Next morning, I woke up around 8. Breakfast was served, and I was gorging on some awesome food when my mom told me, I have a meeting setup at 11 to meet this girl. I froze with shock. How could she have arranged all of this in such a short time? I was utterly baffled on the surface but deep down I was impressed by the efficiency and determination of my parents. That was checkmate for me, I couldn't run anywhere. Maybe it was the tiredness or jet lag, but I couldn't think of any reason to get out of that meeting. So I agreed and I met this girl. She was nice but I didn't find her interesting enough to continue talking to her. So I told my parents this wouldn't work. They were like, that's alright, we already have another meeting setup for next week. Boy! they are professionals.
So a week later, my mom and I rode an hour in a auto rickshaw to meet this family from Pune who had come down to Mumbai for a wedding. Their contingent had 6 people. The girl was accompanied by her parents, her dad's brother and his wife and her mom's brother. On my end, it was just my mom and I. The girl had a very cute and bright smile. She was very simple yet I could see a mischievous tinkle in her eyes. Due to the large gathering, I could only talk to her for 5 minutes. I ended up talking to her dad for most of the time. It was so awkward to talk to her with all these people sitting right next to us. I ended up asking some stupid questions about work. Thank God she worked in Information Technology. That gave me something to talk about. The whole group chatted for about an hour before dispersing. On my way home, my mom asked me the usual question "So, what do you think about her?" I told her that I found this girl cute and I would like to know her better. I eventually decided to marry this girl. Her name is Vibha.
Luckily, my family had to go to Pune to attend a wedding the next week. My mom used this opportunity to setup a meeting with Vibha. This time I was able to take her away from everyone else. We stood by the food (Chaat) stall at the wedding and spoke for a while. The more I spoke to her, the more interested I was in her. She was so different from all the other girls in my life. She was simple, naïve yet feisty and mischievous. I was intrigued. I was supposed to fly back the next day so I told her lets spend some time knowing each other before deciding about marriage. She agreed and I headed back with the image of her smiling face.
Next day, I flew by to the US and our long distance phone calls began. We spoke almost every day. She looked at things in a completely different way. I loved that about her. In a month I decided that I was ready to marry Vibha. It has been 6 months since I have known her and every day I like her more. My whole family has met her and they adore her. Before meeting her, I had this absurd list of things I would have liked in my "perfect" girl. I call that list absurd because looking back, I feel I was so immature to have such a list. With Vibha, I didn't have to think or analyze. It felt so normal to say, "Yes I want to spend the rest of my life with you". Usually, I would choke due to fear of commitment. But there is something special about Vibha that just made this decision super easy. In the end, I know we do have a long life ahead of us and we have to work together in making it successful, but with Vibha on my side, I have a real good feeling about the rest of my life.
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