When ‘Love Marriage’ Needs A Little Help - guardian.co.uk

After decades of fixing arranged marriages for their children, Indian parents are taking on a new challenge: trying to orchestrate their kids’ love marriages.

A new generation of young Indian professionals has refused to follow the arranged-marriage route, with its emphasis on caste, family ties, wealth and skin color – with the blessings of their parents.

But as these kids tread toward their 30s, some parents say they fear their offspring’s chances of finding a marriage partner are evaporating entirely. These parents, while trying to respect their children’s wishes, are trying other measures, like pushing their offspring to singles networks and online dating sites.

Take Pramodini Srinivasan, a former trainer in the information technology industry and now a writer for a wellness Web site. Ms. Srinivasan has a Bangalore-based nephew who is nearing 40 and a Bangalore-bred son in London who is hitting 30. Both are indifferent to marrying within their traditional south Indian community.

But neither has made any headway in finding a wife on their own, even though Ms. Srinivasan has declared that she would be happy for them to fall in love and marry.

Having agreed not to tap the network of Ms. Srinivasan’s traditional community for suitable wives, Ms. Srinivasan is now laying out her son’s and nephew’s specs to everyone she knows.

On a large social networking group for women, Ms. Srinivasan recently sought advice from hundreds of strangers on getting her eligible nephew hitched. Somebody suggested she tap into her circle of friends but Ms. Srinivasan confided that her network was limited.

She wanted to register him on a dating site. “But he is not daring enough,” she rued. She urged him to start a trekking ground and take young people out on weekends so he could meet a compatible “outdoors type.”

Ayush Ranka for The New York TimesA young couple in Bangalore.

The women the men want are a new breed: smart, sophisticated, financially independent marriage partners. Arranging a match within a community is daunting enough, Ms. Srinivasan and concerned parents like her say, but fixing up a match with the amended specs is confounding even in Bangalore, a friendly city full of ambitious young professionals.

The alternative for parents like Ms. Srinivasan is to nudge their children to sign up for online singles networks. Two of them, Floh andTwolyMadlyDeeply, are based in Bangalore but have operations in other Indian metropolitan areas too.

Both were created to fill a growing need for urban Indians seeking educated global professionals like themselves, without regards to caste, region, language or any of the other traditional matrimonial requirements, but the two networks are not immune to parental influence.

Floh, which was started by a Bangalore couple, Simran and Siddharth Mangharam, has 500 members, a third referred by parents who even paid the 15,000-rupee ($300) annual subscription on their kids’ behalf. TwolyMadlyDeeply’s founder, Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, said in several of his nearly 500 members’ prescreening interviews, singles said their parents had urged them to register.

It is easy to see in all of this a new shade of “arranged” marriage, a further dimension of the famous Indian parental control, no matter how well-educated and accomplished their children are.

Still, it is a huge leap from a time even a few years ago when marriages were arranged within a network of connections, longstanding business relationships and the extended caste circle after matching astrological horoscopes. Now parents say they are flummoxed with the new parameter of mate-finding: compatibility.

Online matchmaking sites have been around in India for quite some time, like Shaadi.com or Bharatmatrimony.com, but they are long shot in a country of a billion-plus people, where parents who register on behalf of their children are besieged by messages proclaiming that “there are 1,863 singles in your city waiting to meet you!” And many parents disapprove of Indian dating Web sites as they have a highly skewed to males, and can be crammed with unverified identities and obscene content.

In contrast, singles networks like Floh and TwolyMadlyDeeply, with their “verified” memberships, appeal to parents because they promise the exact opposite of digital anonymity. TwolyMadlyDeeply’s members are vetted on the phone before they can join and can only then interact online or through real-time events.

Floh’s members are gainfully employed singles between 25 and 35 who are sussed out personally by the co-founders. “Our operation is so legit that parents feel a comfort level,” said Mr. Mangharam, who had worked at Coca-Cola and McKinsey before teaming up with his wife to create Floh 18 months ago.

The members are then invited to paid events in informal settings such as wine-food pairings, dance workshops and Hollywood-Bollywood movie quizzes — meetups of the type common in the West. A majority of the members are well-heeled professionals and business owners.

“At our events, singles get to know each other at a nuanced level, minus the posturing that is a trademark of parent-arranged meetings,” said Mrs. Mangharam.

There are still many skeptical parents out there who distrust these new-age devices.

Mala Bhandary, a Bangalore homemaker, balks at the thought of registering her two eligible offspring, a United States-educated son who is now based in Bangalore and a Bangalore-raised daughter who works in New York, on matrimonial Web sites or dating networks. “Nobody can tell what kind of riffraff is there,” said the outgoing Mrs. Bhandary.

Instead, she relentlessly taps into her personal networks to find mates not just her own kids but those of her friends and relatives as well. So far, she has met with little success. “It is very stressful,” said Mrs. Bhandary.

Floh’s founders say they expect it to only be a matter of time before more parents come around. At a wedding recently for a couple who met through Floh, the Mangharams were accosted by a parent of the bride.The man effusively thanked them for performing, as he said, a “social service.