Matched in heaven, monetised on earth!

Marriage is an evergreen and one of the most profitable business in India. Be it the tasteless catering or tacky decorations, horny honeymoons or hoopla over photo shoots, money and booze simply keeps overflowing through the entire season of endless rituals.

Talk about arranged marriages and 'chachi ki friend ka beta USA mei engineer hai, baat chalaun?' is no more a way to get it fixed.

Even marriage bureaus and print media are a thing of past. Who after all has a time to read newspapers or maintain offline relations?!  

Unfortunately Facebook and twitter haven't taken up the job of serious match making seriously.They are still a platform for casual flings, leaching and after-retirement testosterone reactivity!

With over lakhs of profiles in all shades of compact powder, lipsticks and bows-ties, matrimonial sites are mushrooming on the world web as the newest and most trusted match making database today.

Dig a little deeper, you shall see thousands of fully covered yet curvy pics. An inch of cleavage with pouted lips garners a huge number of clicks. 

In case of wanting to be grooms, accidentally added number of zeros in the salary makes you a hero. And don't forget to mention on-call duties as on-site ones. 

Edited till they fit in the parent's dream of being the most eligible (read desperate) match in town, profiles are created with high hopes and honeymoon fantasies only to find that 

money is honey, my little sonny, a rich man's profiles is always visible for matrimony! 

In other words, the higher you pay a matrimonial site, higher goes your chances of getting hitched. So it is sensible to keep some bucks in your pocket rather than mentioning them all in your resume.

The cost of getting registered on any regular site ranges from 5,000 to 50,000 (Elite club) for 3 months. No wonder these sites are expected to earn a revenue of around 900 crore by the end of the year which would mean about a 33% increase in profits from last year. No prizes for guessing that the next year profit can be anywhere between 40 to even a whopping 50%!

The story doesn't end here, these matrimonial sites have given birth to a new  business. Some housewives and retirees realised that Majority of Indians are still technically challenged and with a radicular shift towards smaller nuclear families its virtually impossible for them to know the nuances of creating profiles and accounts on the net.

So they grabbed this opportunity and have thrown themselves as cement to bridge in the gap. These people technically-aid interested parents to look through the potential profiles, contact them and do the needful. This too comes at a price of course, ranging anywhere between 1,500 to 10,000 for 3 months.

To sum it up, all those involved in this business of alliance and selling marriages always have a win-win situation. If you can manage to hitch them up, your clientele notches up. If not, well, the search never ends.

Its quite interesting to see how intimately marriage and money are related. Perhaps, until and unless you club these soulmates its impossible to find your own!

A deeper look into our 'shadi' business makes me conclude that marriages are made in heaven but caste-sized, dramatised, hugely monetised before finally getting finalised in India!