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Tariq Ahmed with his bride, Juliana Gidwani. The couple met through an Internet matrimonial agency

Star-crossed Asian lovers click with Net matchmaker

FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN DELHI

In common with thousands of Asian youngsters seeking to update a custom older than the Mahabharata, the 27-year-old Silicon Valley computer expert turned to the growing number of Internet matrimonial sites dedicated to finding a suitable boy or girl.

She turned out to be 26-year-old Juliana Gidwani, who saw his advertisement on the Muslim Matrimonial Link, and began a courtship that ended in September last year when they married near her home in Singapore. The wedding pictures, needless to say, were immediately posted on the Web.

Born in London to a Pakistani father and Austrian mother, Mr Ahmed, a designer of Web pages, had little difficulty producing his own tongue-in-cheek site that poked fun at the custom of would-be brides and grooms describing themselves and their ideal partners in minute detail.

He freely admits that like all his Muslim friends in America he had to take an active hand in his love life, or risk being excluded by the society in which he lived. "I have many friends and we have all led secret lives," he said. "My dad has become extremely religious over the years and he just wanted me to marry a Muslim girl. He would have preferred someone super-conservative, but that was the minimum he would settle for.

"The Internet isn't ideal because you have to use e-mails and when you are talking in text you are only getting a bit of information. And text can't describe chemistry, which luckily after some time getting to know each other, we discovered we had."

Not all, however, find instant success. Despite the most elaborate of advertisements outlining his handsome and "wheatish" (light-skinned) features, Kumar Kakumanu is yet to find the perfect mate. His advertisement is one of thousands of minutely-detailed classifieds that appear every week in newspapers across the Indian subcontinent seeking to match Brahmin with Brahmin or Punjabi with Punjabi.

Kumar Kakumanu's lonely hearts advice

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Every Sunday up to 14 pages can be found in The Times of India's matrimonial section, For the Better Half of Your Life, providing the paper's largest source of classified advertising revenue. The list of specifications outlined can resemble a specialist car market, breaking down the type of match by religion, caste, class, profession, nationality and region.

Mr Kakumanu, 31, a New York-based Indian born in Hyderabad, said: "I have been in the US for about ten years now and I am looking for an Indian girl with a cosmopolitan outlook. India is divided by so many languages, cultures, castes. With the Internet it is possible to specifically target or broaden your search criteria. Traditional methods are just too slow. Most of them involve hiring 'marriage brokers' who go by contacts. But it is difficult to go beyond a city or town and then you are limited to the choices they offer."

While the youngsters' priority is to modernise, the older generation often seeks to adapt the old ways in order to retain them. One colonel from Ahmedabad, searching for a Brahmin for his daughter, spoke favourably of the Internet but had reservations about the pace of change. "Although we are modern in outlook, there are class and economic considerations, age and horoscope to take into account," he said.

Speed and control are the keys, with websites and e-mail addresses allowing prospective partners to choose the level of anonymity they wish to keep, and to select people from further afield. The Internet also allows families to do in days what once took months - shortlisting candidates, checking backgrounds, exchanging pictures and establishing whether the bride and groom's astrological portents are auspicious.

Sara, 27, is an Indian-born Christian studying in America. After her parents' matchmaking attempts failed she began her own search, registering with the Internet agency A1 Indian Matrimonials in what began as a search for pen pals but quickly developed into a serious quest for a partner. The replies flooded in, and she quickly found a potential husband. "He's a doctor, a real golden boy with a flood of proposals from good families, but his parents have gone nuts trying to get him to accept."

www.A1Im.com A1 Indian matrimonials
www.matrimonials.com/ internet matrtimonials, for Indians and Muslims
www.dopejam.com.com/ Tariq Ahmed's home site

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