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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Society: Suitable boy sequel
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Society: Suitable boy sequel

Love and arranged marriage in the New India as experienced by two women

The anonymous girl at her apartment in south Delhi. Photographs: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
The anonymous girl at her apartment in south Delhi. Photographs: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Fifty shades of guys

A single’s anthropological excursion into meeting and mating.

This 32-year-old anonymous woman has a reputation. Since July she has been regularly dating different men—a few of them even visiting her south Delhi pad.

The curious thing is that many people in this city and beyond keep themselves updated with her private adventures. That is because she is telling it all on her blog 50 Dates In Delhi, a self-proclaimed experiment in social anthropology in which she plans to date 50 men. “The goal after all," she says in a cheekily written post, “is to see if there are 50 men I could go on one date with."

The woman met one more man on a Saturday afternoon recently at a restaurant in south Delhi’s Basant Lok Market. The rendezvous lasted 2 hours. She wrote later:

The blogger behind 50 Dates In Delhi at her south Delhi home
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The blogger behind 50 Dates In Delhi at her south Delhi home

That “high strung" guy is this reporter. The woman emailed me the above observations to show a sample of her anthropological analysis.

The woman and I had planned this date a week in advance. She permitted me to write about her on the condition of not disclosing her identity. Waiting in the glass-walled restaurant, I saw her walking to my table in a pair of pink shorts. Totally relaxed, she held my hand in a firm grip, and cheerily shook it. As we sat down, I noticed she had two earrings on one ear and only one on the other, and she wore a polo shirt with a frank décolletage.

The first question I asked the woman—which set us off on so many tangents—was “Why be faceless and nameless in the blog?" She is not doing something outrageous. Thousands of women date men, often different men—at least in our big cities. What’s there to be ashamed about?

“I’m not ashamed," the woman said, leaning over her plate of moussaka and garlic toast. “All the guys whom I meet know me by my real name. Most people in my office know about my blog and they love it. My roommate knows about my project. So do most people in my family. I’m just afraid of some random guy trying to stalk me...you cannot rule out such a thing in this country."

The woman, however, has uploaded her photos on her profile page on Okcupid.com, the dating website on which she initially interacts with potential dates. One picture has her waving the Indian flag on a street in Frankfurt, Germany. In another, she is seen posing with her neutered cat.

The woman has dated 14 men in three months; she meets them in restaurants and bars where she doesn’t insist on paying the bill. Sex is never on the agenda during the first encounter, although she ended up kissing at least one guy.

A screenshot of her blog
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A screenshot of her blog

Yet, when she was in her 20s, she asked her parents to find a boy for her.

“They started to laugh and assured me that marriage would happen in time," she said. So far the woman has had only one serious relationship that began and ended in her late 20s. “When I turned 30, I again asked my parents to look around. They tried but it’s an alien process to them. Nobody has had an arranged marriage in my extended family. Even my mother’s mother had a love marriage."

On the irony of an independent strong-willed single woman having to resort to her parents to find a life companion, she said, “I was looking for a boy on my own...but I was trying all the options I had, and one of them was arranged marriage."

‘I’m not ashamed,’ the woman said, leaning over her plate of moussaka and garlic toast. ‘All the guys whom I meet know me by my real name. Most people in my office know about my blog and they love it.’

Indeed, the word “marriage" doesn’t appear on any of her blog-posts.

Earlier, the woman would not consider any boy as a probable suitor if he were not at least four years older than her. He also had to be considerably tall (6ft was the ideal) and had to share her passion for Latin America. Being a “Tam-Brahm" (Tamilian-Brahmin) was a plus point.

Now, these things don’t matter.

“I have developed a better sense of connecting with people," she said. “The really important element of a relationship is believing that your partner would never try to destroy your life."

It was then that we noticed a spectacled young man sitting next to our table. Dark and tall with athletic legs (he was in khaki shorts), the man was industriously tapping on his laptop. Though there was no visible caste mark on his forehead, and no Brahmanical thread showing under his shirt, one couldn’t rule out the remote possibility of him being a Tam-Brahm.

Would the woman like this man to email her for a date?

Throwing a quick sideward glance at him, she said with a big smile, “Why not?"

The WhatsApp order groom

Does the WhatsApp-connected working girl with a boyfriend eventually (still) surrender to an arranged marriage?

Old Delhi’s Kinari Bazar is popular for its wedding accessories
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Old Delhi’s Kinari Bazar is popular for its wedding accessories

And yet, all of it could be just for the show. The girl is resigned to looking for a life partner through arranged marriage.

“Frankly," she says, “I’m only a spectator in all this."

Anyone who knows this girl would consider her fiercely sovereign about her affairs. But her father, not she herself, created her matrimonial profile on the matchmaking website Shaadi.com, and he also manages that account.

With the promise of her identity being kept a secret—lest “this newspaper story destroy me"—the girl spoke candidly about this crucial period of her life in a quiet corner of Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place.

“I can’t see myself compromising, so I have closed my eyes to all this," she says. “My father shortlists the guys. My part is to go to a coffee shop to meet them. I wouldn’t mind a guy who is at least physically not repulsive and is loaded with money."

That’s the least unhappy alternative for a girl standing at the threshold of arranged marriage, a tradition deeply entrenched even in the Capital where young Indians are apparently brash, modern, confident and in full control of their lives. At least the last point is not totally true. According to the recent Hindustan Times 2014 Youth Survey, conducted over 15 cities among more than 5,000 respondents in the 18-25-year age group, 48% girls will “accept arranged marriage without any question".

This woman too has accepted the same, notwithstanding her current relationship. Delving into the details of her quest gives us a sense of the most vulnerable moments of young, cosmopolitan, semi-independent women of contemporary India, and how they eventually succumb to traditions they don’t personally relate to.

“I’m okay with being single," she says. “But I have started to feel a pressure. My mother is also getting worked up."

The girl’s father created her profile on the matrimonial website early this year. Before uploading the all-important portrait shot, she says bemusedly, he lightened her “wheatish" complexion on Photoshop. “My parents have given me the liberty to marry a boy as long as he is not an SC/ST (scheduled caste/scheduled tribe) or a non-Hindu."

Each week, the girl’s father shows her profiles of potentially interesting men. One day she rejected all the “faces" prompting her mother, who married at 19, to loudly proclaim, “I too did not want to marry your father because of his looks. But if I hadn’t agreed to it, you wouldn’t have been sitting here!"

It’s the instant phone messaging service WhatsApp that paves the way for the online interaction to materialize into a real offline meeting. First, the girl’s father mails her mobile number to a prospective groom, who adds the number on his WhatsApp. Then they chat briefly before picking a day to meet each other in a café.

My parents have given me the liberty to marry a boy as long as he is not an SC/ST (scheduled caste/scheduled tribe) or a non-Hindu.

“The HR guy’s profile said he is 6ft," says the girl, “but when I met him at CCD (Café Coffee Day), he was only a little taller than me. What put me off was when he said that he was cool with firing people."

The Dubai-returned happened to be 6ft tall. “I picked him up from a Metro station and drove him to a Barista (café). When I asked him what he was looking for in a woman, he said, ‘A daughter for my father.’ I used the F-word and started to laugh. He didn’t contact me again."

The third boy came wrapped with guarantees of financial security. “He drives an SUV and owns a house in Greater Kailash II," the girl says, referring to a posh south Delhi locality. “He was good to talk to but I think he was gay."

A shop selling wedding cards in Chawri Bazar.
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A shop selling wedding cards in Chawri Bazar.

The girl’s boyfriend himself hails from the border state of Jammu & Kashmir.

“He works in a textile designing firm in Noida. I met him at a friend’s place two years ago. He has such a lovely neck and he looks so untouched. He is a very pious Muslim so we haven’t done anything together except exchanging a few kisses."

Although the girl talks of being “in true love" with this young Kashmiri man, she would not consider marrying him. “One has to be practical. It’s not only that my dad will be disappointed and angry, and that my mother will kill herself, but I’m not willing to convert to Islam. He also understands and accepts that religion divides us. He doesn’t eat pork; I love pork. He doesn’t drink. I don’t know if I would be in touch with him after my marriage...but he has been the best thing in my life so far."

Even as the girl is preparing to distance herself from her love interest, she is getting closer to one of her four suitors—the remotely posted army man.

“Four or five days after our meeting, we suddenly started messaging each other. We would chat about useless things late into the night, the kind that I would regret the morning after. Recently, he returned to Delhi for a week’s holiday. Each evening, he picked me up from the office where he would arrive dressed in his army uniform. We would drive on the Yamuna expressway. He has a beautiful voice and he would sing along with the FM songs (on his car radio). Since I always wear low-back kurtas and T-shirts, he would caress my back. Once he kissed me. I tried to be outraged...."

Could he be Mr Right?

“I don’t think I can marry him. He talks crudely to restaurant waiters and parking attendants. His English is embarrassing. My parents would freak out if they learned of our car rides. As far as they are concerned, I originally met the fauji (army guy) for a purpose, and if that’s not working, then I have no business meeting him. But he is fun to hang out with. Honestly, I could have considered him seriously but I cannot live away from big cities."

Meanwhile, the girl’s father has shown her another profile.

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Published: 11 Oct 2014, 12:06 AM IST
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