A type away

If you really think about it, there is little difference in the way North Americans and Indians search for love. Online, that is. Except one looks to virtually date and the other seek to marry. The explosion of websites on both sides of the world says it all. In the US and Canada, my friends casually date through sites like Lavalife. For wedded bliss, they may answer a painstaking list of questions on eharmony.

Not much differs across the Atlantic. In India, sites like shaadi.com are enjoying unprecedented growth (in advertising sales and site traffic). That is not to say love is abound.

The horror stories stack up much higher. And it gets more complicated if you are a South Asian woman in North America, navigating an Indian marriage site. Writes a friend: I remember getting emails from guys who faked their jobs, where they lived, what they looked like, etc. My favorite email was one from a guy's mother who found my profile and she said, "I don't like that you work. You can't work. And how do we get Canadian citizenship? We want it, but we don't want to move there. You have to come to India."

When in a moment of silence, my mother noticed I was still fussing about a recent break up in my head, she let it slip: My father was thinking of turning me into a marriage market statistic by adding my name to a matrimonial site. Which I heard as such: Run.Surya.Run

I made my case, with all the salient points outlined above. My parents and friends had seen me go through a particularly humiliating break up. Understandably, my father was concerned. He went from toasting his daughter’s happiness to furiously calling my ex, demanding he have the “moral courage” to answer to him. After all, I was an almost 30-year-old, single Indian girl living abroad, and pursuing a career that leaves little time to meet sober Indian men (though my ex was neither sober nor Indian). The new reality was a stark reminder of how clueless my father was about matchmaking. And he (almost) did what thousands of aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and fathers in India decide every day: List an eligible family member on an website.

This time, I tugged at his heart strings: if he was proud of his journalist daughter, he would allow her this. Find a man who can spell. And then I showed him a choice sampling of what the sites had to offer:

(sic) I am liveing in dubai for past 5yers i am working as designer in cad and prodection manger in adv co ... so if any one intrested in me pla call or e mail . i am looking for a honest and trust good normel color girl who can lead with me in life and make up the mind to live with me for ever ..then all later if we like each other thnx

I remain unlisted.