From a distance, she seemed
perfect. Her e-mail messages were witty, evoking the chemistry Tariq Ahmed
longed for in a soul mate. But after an 11-hour drive to Toledo, Ohio,
Ahmed's vision of the perfect bride vaporized the moment they met.
``There was no mutual attraction,'' says Ahmed, a
29-year-old Web engineer in Palo Alto. ``It was like going to the counter
and ordering something.''
Ahmed, a Canadian citizen who is half Pakistani and half Austrian,
wound up driving from Ottawa to Ohio because he wanted to find a Muslim
wife without enduring the awkward ritual of family-brokered introductions.
So the self-described ``Net freak'' took the route favored by growing
numbers of South Asians these days: He posted a personal ad on a
matrimonial Web site geared specifically toward his culture, in which
arranged marriage is still common.
Unlike broader matchmaking sites
that hook up singles on dates, South Asian matrimonial sites, as the
phrase implies, are frankly aimed at finding partners for life, wherever
they are. Geography is less of an obstacle than the uniquely South Asian
categories of religion and caste, common search fields on matrimonial
sites.
Looking high and
low
Ahmed pursued love through http://www.matrimonials.com/,
run by 4You Net Services Inc. of Lakewood, Ohio. Its site offers one link
for Indians -- ``for people of South Asian heritage'' -- and another for
Muslims ``of any origin,'' most of whom are from the subcontinent. The
5-year-old site charges a $30 membership fee to post a six-month ad that
enters a searchable database of thousands of marriage-minded men and women
of Indian and South Asian descent.
It's just one of scores of such Internet venues that have sprung up in
recent years to accommodate sophisticated South Asians around the world,
blending ethnic tradition with modern technology. They're a high-tech
version of a decades-old Indian custom of newspaper matrimonial ads, and a
natural extension of a culture of matchmaking, whether between families,
friends or professional marriage brokers.
Some youths turned
off
Some young South Asians are turned off by the sites.
``The Web sites I see have guys on them like the ones my parents want me
to marry, a.k.a. nerds,'' says Monica Bhatnagar, 24, who grew up in
Alameda. ``They may be perfectly great husbands, but I prefer to find
someone on my own.''
That was harder for Ahmed. The son of a religious Pakistani
father and an Austrian mother who converted to Islam, Ahmed couldn't date
at all. ``Tradition won't let you meet a person 50 times,'' he says. ``You
have only two or three times, and then you make a decision.'' Family
introductions in Ottawa were excruciating ordeals during which Ahmed and
his potential bride ``were just sitting there with nothing to say because
parents are talking about things that happened in 1946,'' the tumultuous
year that led to the partition of India and Pakistan.
Ahmed had another strategy to meet women. ``Weddings are your best
bet,'' he says. ``I made sure I was at every wedding, dressed to the
max.''
But Ahmed's fashion displays didn't get results, and it didn't take him
long to reject the handful of eligible Muslim women introduced by
relatives.
``You go through everybody's list of contacts real fast,'' he says.
``My parents, uncles and seven aunts could only come up with a handful of
daughters. I decided, OK, the only way this is going to happen is if I
have a lot more control.''
When Ahmed turned 24 in 1996, he decided to conduct his own search. A
Web ad seemed an efficient and more individualistic way to find a spouse
than the hidebound methods of family setups, newspaper ads and paid
matchmakers. ``My parents had no idea what was going on,'' he says. ``It
was stealth.''
Ahmed scanned other matrimonial ads and strove to outdo them with his
computer-engineering background. The result was a graphically
sophisticated ad featuring ``husband model #49321.'' It included pictures
of Ahmed's cat and statistics on his lung capacity -- two liters -- to
stand out amid the crowded databases of eligible South Asian singles.
Turning on charm
Ahmed's sassy ad subtly mocked the usual sought-after
attributes such as skin color. Fair skin, or ``wheatish'' as they say in
India, is highly valued among South Asians, and some matrimonial Web sites
include it as a search category.
The largest sites -- such as Matrimonials.com, IndianMarriages.com,
SuitableMatch.com, Matrimonialonline.com and Cyberproposal.com -- all
allow members to seek dream spouses with categories ranging from simple
criteria such as height, caste and horoscope to ultra-detailed scans
tailor-made for the South Asian diaspora.
If you're in the market for, say, a fair-skinned, vegetarian, Sikh
engineer in the United States on an H-1B visa, IndianMarriages.com's site
can look for his ad. But matrimonial-site operators say the most requested
search categories are weight, height, religion, caste and occupation.
Ahmed got more than 400 e-mail responses from all over the world. He
wrote back to each and every one.
He began spending eight to 12 hours a day -- at work -- sending e-mail,
whittling down the list and eventually driving to meet 17 women in places
as far as Toledo and Milwaukee.
``I only have so much vacation time, and I have to drive,'' Ahmed says.
``I can't spend thousands of dollars on flights to meet someone when
statistically the odds that they're the one are low.''
His choices were far more numerous today than they would have been even
a decade ago. The number of expatriate South Asians has swelled, propelled
in part by a technology boom that has lured software-proficient
programmers and engineers to American and Canadian soil.
By 1997, there were 748,000 Indian-born U.S. residents, up 66 percent
from 1990. As the ranks of South Asians have grown, matchmaking sites to
serve them have evolved well beyond their early prototypes.
Now the sites are round-the-clock businesses, and some say they are
profitable, though they won't disclose numbers. Matrimonialonline.com, one
of the largest sites, operates out of the Fremont apartment of Suresh
Ganapathy, whose day job is as an information-technology manager at a
financial-services firm in San Francisco.
Ganapathy maintains the 5-year-old site with the help of an office in
India and his family. Ganapathy's sister, Subbulakshmi, is a software
engineer who backs up the database after she gets home from her day job in
Cupertino. Ganapathy's wife, Priya Suresh, works full time answering
e-mail and modifying profiles of their 2,800 paid members.
The family spends weekends tending to the site, which generates an
average of 300 e-mail messages a day. The earliest paid members were
mostly South Asian men living in the United States and Canada, but now
membership is more evenly split between the sexes, with more and more men
and women posting ads from India. The same holds true for other sites.
Gautam Ghosh, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania,
finds symbolism in the use of the Internet to find a South Asian spouse,
given growing pride in India's role as a software superpower.
``People think the software industry is what will get India out of its
Third World stigma,'' Ghosh says. ``The medium is the message here. The
very fact that you're using an online service suggests you're desirable.''
The medium took a few years to pay off for Ahmed.
After two years of advertising himself on the Net, Ahmed was
disappointed -- and exhausted. His Toledo rendezvous was the first of
many, and they went downhill from there. ``My e-mails were getting shorter
and shorter,'' he says. ``Sometimes I'd just cut and paste my lifelong
story.''
In 1998, Ahmed moved to the Bay Area on a special work visa. He took a
break from his search, but kept exchanging e-mail with a woman in
Singapore named Juliana Gidwani. Like Ahmed, Gidwani is racially mixed --
half Indonesian, half Indian -- and had similar interests. One day, Ahmed
says, they were ``talking ICQ'' -- chatting in real time on the Net --
when something clicked.
One out of 400
Ahmed rolled the dice. He'd seen Gidwani's picture and
thought she was attractive. He bought a ticket to Singapore, regarding it
as a vacation if nothing panned out.
Cupid struck at the arrival gate.
``As soon as I saw her at the airport, I knew she was the one,'' Ahmed
says.
He asked for her hand two days later.
Three months after that, in September 1999, they were married in an
elaborate three-day celebration in Singapore, which he posted to the Web
(www.dopejam.com/memories/mywed).
They live in Tracy so Gidwani can commute to an M.B.A. program at the
University of California-Davis.
``I've never had people say, `Oh my god, you're a loser, you found
someone on the Net,' '' Ahmed says. ``They're more like, `It
worked?' ''
