Email
Print
ShareLet's call her Madame X. Until just six months ago she was quite happy with her interior business. Business wasn't quite booming but it kept her afloat -- and then some. Recession had begun to eat into it. Her circle of friends and clients didn't want to facelift their homes each time the season changed. She was also getting bored.
But then she had a Eureka moment. It happened when an acquaintance was looking for a suitable boy for her daughter who was perilously close to the tipping point of 30. Where had all the boys gone, the flustered mother sighed, more a lament than an exclamation. Our Madame X did some mental juggling of images of the sons of her friends and bingo, there was a match. It actually worked. So, she set up an informal matchmaking business that rapidly rippled out beyond her gilded circle.
She isn't the only one: socialite-matchmakers are springing up in Delhi. I've also heard of a couple of them in Mumbai trying their hand at playing professional cupids in these hard times.
Nothing new about all this you would say. And rightly so: these ladies who lunch are the avatars of the nais, the "traditional village barbers who brokered marriage alliances as their razors glided over soaped-up faces and the busy-bee chaudhranis who played matchmakers for the well-to-do. These ladies did not charge but a substantial gift was an expected award for a match struck.
What has changed is the matrimonial landscape. Cupid has been a bit lazy, or shall we say handicapped, in our post-liberalisation age. Take Madame X: most of the customers who have come to her during the last couple of months are in their 30s, and even 40s. Time is playing culprit here: by the time a girl finishes her Masters or an MBA, has worked a couple of years and tasted life a bitshe is closer to 30 than 20: economic independence is getting to be as much a must for women as it is for men. Hence, the where-have-all-the-boys-gone sigh.
It's pretty much the same for men. Moreover, long and uncertain hours at work keep them from meeting potential brides until they, too, are nudging their third decade. For our NRI boys the matrimonial landscape is even bleaker. NRI grooms are no longer the prize catches they were even two years ago. Recession has taken its toll here: the American press has carried several stories about disappointed desi-Americans who return empty-handed after whistle-stop bride-catching trips to the homeland.
Our desi girls -- increasingly -- don't want to leave India for distant shores. Life's fine here, thank you. Many enjoy their professional careers and they can live the American dream life right here. Gucci, Pucci and every other brand -- if not great knock-offs -- are coming to or are already in your neighbourhood. Nor do they have to dohousework and change nappies.
A relative furiously looking for a match for her "well-qualified" son, who is on the verge of heading towards the US for a lucrative life, complained that "the shoe was now on the other foot". It's been two years that she began to systematically look for a suitable daughter-in-law. She scoured matrimonial ads in newspapers and agencies. Where, indeed, have all the girls gone. Old romantics like me wonder where love--or romance--have gone. I suppose love in the time of liberalisation is getting to be
elusive. Busy getting or holding on to jobs love becomes a casualty.
Still, we are not as bad as Singapore where the government had to intervene. Worried about their shrinking population the Singapore government introduced free cruises for young people with the intention of throwing them together and sparking love, followed by marriage and babies.
Perhaps our Delhi socialite marriage broker can upgrade to this. Currently, she throws cocktails where the young mingle.
