Feature

By Sonia Moghe

The Marriage Web, Part II of III (read part I)

The man behind Shaadi.com is Anupam Mittal, a 35-year-old businessman from Mumbai. He is young, hip and well-connected, judging by the picture of Paris Hilton holding a copy of his CD on his Facebook page. His Facebook wall is covered with congratulations for being featured in a Dell, Inc. advertisement, now that he’s an ambassador for the Indian side of their business. There are pictures of him at clubs and on red carpets. But, for someone who started the first-ever and most successful matrimonial site, he is, surprisingly, not married.

“Just because somebody isn’t married, you cannot assume I haven’t found my partner,” Mittal notes. “I think it would be ironic if I was looking to get married.”

Mittal was on the marriage market at one point, over 12 years ago, when he had the idea for the website. Mittal had a brief encounter with a marriage broker, a person who carries “bio-datas”—resumes for potential marriage matches—in his bag and goes door-to-door attempting to make matches. The matchmaker gets paid if a match works out. The situation, Mittal says, made him curious: “How many bio-datas can this man carry in his suitcase? How many people can he visit in one month? Does this mean that this man's strength [the stronger he is, the more bio-datas he can carry] and his traveling abilities [the more people he visits, the better the chances] will determine whom I marry? What if my soul mate is in Timbuktu? This guy cannot get there.”

Mittal’s idea has grown into a 400-person company that boasts over 200 million page views a month and a huge slice of the $10 billion matrimonial industry market. Also, the company may have shifted the responsibility and power of matchmaking from parents to their children, as more and more people put their own profiles up on Shaadi.com looking for a mate.

“Parents [once] chose somebody and their child married them without objecting. Now it’s a decision that the parent and the child make together,” Mittal says. “There’s no question about it that there’s more and more people in India that want to exercise a certain level of influence on the decision of their lives.”

For those who are too ashamed to admit they are on Shaadi.com, Mittal throws out this fact: 150 million people in the U.S. use online dating sites.

“In fact the people not using [online dating sites] has become smaller than those that do,” he quips.

The U.S. is Shaadi.com’s biggest market because there has always been a strong need to connect South Asians who are often in isolated communities to each other. Shaadi.com manages to continue doing well despite the economic downturn worldwide because, according to Mittal, people are always looking for someone.

Richard*, a resident pathologist, works the overnight shift at LaGuardia Hospital in Queens. He spends nights testing batches of blood needed for transfusions, but during the day — when he’s awake — he devotes time, energy and money to his second job: finding the one.

The Caribbean-born and raised Indian doesn’t look for her in bars or at meetup groups. He looks for her online, in the digital club that is Shaadi.com.

“Your likelihood of finding a conservative woman is greater — which is my ultimate goal,” he says. “The problem…with a lot of conservative women is you don’t really get to know them.”

Shaadi.com works a bit like American dating sites. First, a user creates an anonymous profile with a picture of him or herself and only a screen name for identification. Some have screen names like Readytomarryat27, Reddy4More, GoodTimeAssured28, JustLooking_0282 and Somebody_Stop_Me. Richard’s screen name is subzero80, for his love of a Mortal Kombat character with the same name and the year he was born. This also signals that time is running out for Richard, who turns 29 in March.

“A few nights ago, I woke up sweating and I was like, ‘Damn I’m turning old. By 30, I have to find someone, seriously,’” he says.

This is why Richard is increasing his odds by using not one but three sites to try to find his wife. He created similar profiles on Yahoo Personals and Match.com.

“Everything is a game of numbers,” Richard claims. “The more responses you send out, the more replies you get, the greater the pool you have to choose from.”

The differences between his Shaadi.com and Yahoo Personals profiles aren’t immediately apparent at first. It’s not that Richard has different responses on the different profiles, it’s that the profiles ask for different things. Both Shaadi.com and Yahoo Personals ask questions about age, height, weight, smoking habits, drinking habits, body type, education, occupation and income level. Yahoo Personals asks whether you have children, but Shaadi.com doesn’t venture into that territory. Two years ago, a website called SecondShaadi.com was launched specifically for people who are divorced, and these profiles ask about children. Match.com asks questions about what you do for fun, favorite places, the last thing you read, etc. But the biggest difference between Shaadi.com and the others is family. Shaadi.com asks questions about what your family does, how many siblings you have and if any of them are married.

Unlike some single people whose parents put their profiles on the site, Richard has put his profile up himself.

He mostly looks at women who are in the area, and the first thing he looks at — like most people — is their pictures. He knows precisely what he’s looking for in a woman.

“Preity Zinta,” he says, referring to the fair-skinned, deeply-dimpled Bollywood film star. “She is a gold standard of an attractive woman or of what an attractive woman should be.”

Part of the appeal of Zinta is her fair skin — considered more beautiful than darker skin in many South Asian cultures. The South Asian obsession with being pale has spawned an entire industry of products. Ponds, famous for its moisturizers and cold creams, released a product in 2008 to capitalize on the South Asian desire for lighter skin: a lightening cream called White Beauty. It even released an episodic chain of ads featuring a “dark” South Asian woman who gets left by her boyfriend for a pale skinned woman, only to win him back after using White Beauty.

Richard thinks there are deeply rooted reasons for this complexion complex and why males tend to be attracted to a woman with lighter skin.

“I think because she was lighter than the rest of them, you are in awe,” he said. “The colonial deeds have left a psychological scar in the minds of those who are dark. They were the power base back then.”

This complexion-consciousness is reflected on Shaadi.com. The fifth question you’re required to fill in is about your complexion. You’re either “very fair,” “fair,” “wheatish,” “wheatish medium,” “wheatish brown” or “dark.” Neither Richard nor others interviewed could exactly pinpoint what “wheatish” means.

While Preity Zinta is likely not on a matrimonial site, Richard does peruse face after face until he finds one that he likes. You can “express interest” with the hit of a button, sometimes adding a message to try to start up a conversation with someone. But with Shaadi.com, you can see more than face value.

Richard’s profile, for example, shows that he has never been married, makes between $50,000 and $75,000 a year and has two brothers and two sisters, one of whom is married. For the average Shaadi.com user, these tidbits are not mere details but are far more important than the type of music he listens to.

Even with so much of his personal information on display, Richard manages to hang onto his anonymity, to the point where he’s been able to cut off a handful of prospective candidates.

“I got off [Shaadi.com] because the number of candidates were building up,” says Richard. “It was becoming too much of a burden to communicate with five women. I lost one here, I lost another one there. I was off for about six months.”

It’s not uncommon for people to get on and off of Shaadi.com. Twenty-nine-year-old Sameer is taking his second shot at trying to find someone.

Sameer was first on Shaadi.com in 2006, when he started conversing with a woman his age through the site’s matrimonial messenger, an instant messaging service. After a few weeks of talking on the phone, Sameer decided to fly to Canada to meet her.

“I would get a hotel,” he says. “She would keep me [a secret].”

Unlike the way many South Asian marriages operate, neither he nor she — who lived with her parents — informed their parents that they were interested in each other.

“We kept the parents out of it until we knew that we were going to go forward with it.”

However, many parents do “broker” some of the matches, even posting profiles for their sons or daughters without telling them. After getting responses and doing “background checks” — calling friends to see if they know about prospective candidates’ backgrounds — parents offer a short list of eligible candidates and let their children choose. Sameer says he has received interest from girls’ parents in the past, but he won’t talk to them.

“Why would I talk to their parents?” Sameer adds, “I’ll talk to their parents in time if things start clicking.”

Sameer fell in love after just weeks of talking to the girl from Canada, and two months after they started talking, they were engaged. They had a big wedding in Canada three months later. After getting married, though, they fought.

“She just didn’t understand what a marriage was, in my opinion,” Sameer says. “Stuff like respecting my parents and demanding a lot of stuff. She didn’t want to work things out in an adult fashion.”

Perhaps he might have known some of these things about his now ex-wife if he’d gotten to know her for longer, he admits. It’s something that he will do differently this time around.

“My speculation is that she wanted to get out [of] her parents’ house,” claims Sameer.

Although his divorce is in the past, it’s still emblazoned at the top of his profile, probably causing half of the girls he contacts to reject him, he speculates.

“It still hurts me that I’m divorced,” Sameer says. “I still joke I’m damaged goods now. I’m blacklisted.”

Looking back, Sameer now sees some red flags he missed when he first decided to marry his ex.

“She was trying to push my family and me to have a court wedding in Raleigh and then we’d go back to Canada. Now that I think about it, that’s a warning sign.”

He realized that her desire to skip a big wedding and get married might have been a sign that she mainly wanted to get married to become a U.S. citizen.

Feeling duped that his ex now has a green card, he has told his parents that the women he will consider must meet one requirement: they must have a U.S. passport.

Having been raised in Ohio, Sameer hopes his next — and hopefully last — wife will have the same background as him: Indian and raised in America.

“The girls in India — I don’t want to have to teach them the American value system and blah, blah, blah,” Sameer states.

And even though he faces more and more rejection from girls’ families who want their daughters to marry men who are “pure,” Sameer thinks online rejection is preferable to being rejected in person at a bar or a party.

“I look at it like you have your resume out there on Monster [the job-seeking website],” Sameer says. “You keep it out there, and if an employer likes you they’ll contact you.”

If you didn't catch part I, click here. Part III will be in next month’s issue of ABCDlady.

* Individual interviewed with us on the condition of anonymity.

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