Once again I am in debt to Harper's, without a doubt the best damn magazine in the world.

In the February 2008 Harper's Index I discovered that Shaadi.com, an immensely popular matchmaking site for South Asians (or "matrimonials site", as we beige folk like to say) allows listees to choose from no less than six skin tones and 275 castes.

I poked around the site and discovered they also offer a menu of 28 communities and 67 mother tongues.

Does this make it impossible to choose a mate? Far from it.

Shaadi.com estimates it has made between 800,000 and a million successful "matches".
It has over 10 million members, numbers that make it one of the most successful and most admired online companies in all of Asia.

It even lets you search for matches in the USA and Canada.

Now you know where to look if you're in the market for a wheaten complexion male Iyengar Brahmin MIT engineer with a green card or a very fair, tall Sikh lady doctor coming from a very respectable family based in Malton, Ontario.

And oh, every single shaadi.com page is in English.


Article: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin Barrett



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photo of mehndi at Indian wedding: by Riffat, via flickr
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