{"id":603,"date":"2004-11-15T12:22:17","date_gmt":"2004-11-15T06:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madmanweb.com\/2004\/11\/15\/the_future_of_m\/"},"modified":"2004-11-15T12:22:17","modified_gmt":"2004-11-15T06:52:17","slug":"the_future_of_m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/2004\/11\/the_future_of_m\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of matrimonial classifieds"},"content":{"rendered":"

I noticed something interesting the other day as I walked into the offices of
\nthe Times of India to place a classifieds ad for some waiters for my
\nrestaurant<\/a>. As I was handing in the form to the lady at the counter, a sign
\non the side caught my eye (mostly because I saw a "10% off" screaming
\nfrom it.) Unfortunately, I wasn’t carrying my digicam with me, so I’ll have to
\nparaphrase what the sign said.<\/p>\n

Here’s how it essentially read: "If you place a matrimonial classifieds
\nad and do not specify any religion, caste, or regional criteria, we will give
\nyou a 10% discount on the ad. We are doing our bit for the betterment of society
\nand eliminating bigotry." <\/p>\n

I was quite pleasantly surprised to see an initiative like this from an
\notherwise morally bankrupt publishing group. We "educated"
\nmiddle-class and upper-middle-class Indians love to tell others that the caste
\nsystem does not have a strong grip in this country, yet we are unbelievably
\nhypocritical when it comes to marrying off our own sons and daughters. "We
\ndon’t believe in the caste system, but my Sanjay can get married only to a [some
\nlanguage] girl from [some caste] caste."<\/p>\n

Speaking of matrimonial classifieds ads, I think that the growing popularity
\nof online wedding sites like shaadi.com<\/a> will
\nmean the slow death of the print classified ads, at least in English newspapers.
\nThey will do what the spread of cellular phones did to the pager industry (yeah,
\nremember pagers in India?) It won’t happen immediately, but I give it about 3
\nyears. The print medium has severe limitations: you can’t write more than a few
\nlines, which have to as short and sweet as possible, giving you only enough
\nspace to write a bunch of numbers and abbreviations. Here’s an example:
\n"Smart beautiful homely [caste] girl 25\/157\/6000 seeks [caste] qualified
\nwell-settled boy. Contact Box no…" Now this could fit almost anyone,
\ngiving you very little info to go on. Online, however, you don’t have any space
\nrestrictions, and adding more fields isn’t that complicated. It also allows you
\nto easily build databases that can be searched on various criteria. What’s more,
\nit has that most important bit of information – a photo!<\/p>\n

When I mentioned the above Times of India signboard to one of my friends, he
\npointed out to me that one of the matrimonial sites, instead of leading the way,
\nwas actually being regressive in its approach. BharatMatrimony.com<\/a>,
\nthat advertises heavily on many sites, has an annoying "feature"
\nthat’s also a bug. If you want to search for a bride or groom, one of the
\nparameters required is "language". This isn’t a multiple choice thing;
\nyou can only select one language. It then redirects you to one of its
\nlanguage-specific sub-sites where you can search away. However, if you are
\nslightly more modern and don’t particularly care that your prospective partner
\ncome from a particular state, you’re out of luck. There is absolutely no way to
\nspecify "any" as an option or even to search through more than one
\nlanguage. If you want to check out women from all over the country, you just
\nhave to conduct 29 different searches. Isn’t that amusing?<\/p>\n

Lastly, I must mention an interesting conversation I had about our
\nmatrimonial ads with John Rhodes (he runs webword.com<\/a>
\n– a usability site) who was visiting Bangalore for some business. He pointed out
\nsome differences between personal ads in the USA and over here. He found that
\nthe most important criteria here seemed to be the person’s caste, religion and
\nfamily, while in USA, people would put their interests and partner requirements.
\nHe was amused to note the classifieds were divided by language. I just shrugged
\nmy shoulders and said, "well, it will take another couple of generations to
\nget rid of our deep-rooted prejudices."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I noticed something interesting the other day as I walked into the offices of the Times of India to place a classifieds ad for some waiters for my restaurant. As I was handing in the form to the lady at the counter, a sign on the side caught my eye (mostly because I saw a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}