When Sameer Malhotra started looking for a life partner nearly a year ago, the proposals from match-making and matrimonial sites started coming in a dime a dozen. Amid a sea of potential prospects, the 28-year-old was left feeling that something was amiss in the way these sites matched couples.

“I was very clear. My choice could not rest upon parameters such as caste, religion, or community — the cliched parochial yardsticks one banks upon while looking for a spouse. It was much more essential for me to understand the psyche of the girl I would be marrying,” he says.

Samiksha Kaushal, a 26-year-old lawyer, belonged to the same school of thought. After studying abroad for more than a decade, she wanted someone who could match her “psychic mobility”.

“I have seen so much in life. I have travelled half the world and my outlook towards a spouse has been shaped by that. It is very important for me to know whether he has the same burning ambition as I,” she says candidly.

Malhotra and Kaushal are not alone. A growing breed of youngsters, who are professionally qualified and have a more modern outlook, is gradually transforming the Indian matrimonial market. Well travelled and with greater exposure in life, people like Malhotra and Kaushal have bid goodbye to the days when spouses were selected on the basis of caste or religion. Instead, they are diving in to the deeper recesses of the psyche of their prospective match.

Catering to this new generation, many websites have now changed the parameters of match making. They are now focusing on criteria such as role models, social graces, empathy, fellow feeling, and even how racist the prospective candidates are.

Leading the way is Banihal.com, a website that has touched the tipping point with an exhaustive questionnaire with an Artificial Intelligence-based match-making engine that can predict the compatibility of a couple. It targets working professionals in the age group of roughly 25-30 years with a unique definition of an ideal marriage.

Questions include ‘Who is your role model?’ ‘What do you admire in him or her the most?’ ‘What qualities in your father inspire you?’ It has surprising statements like ‘It doesn’t bother me too much if I am late meeting a friend.’ or, ‘when I was a child, I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen.’ And even, ‘Seeing people cry doesn’t really upset me.’

Brainchild of US-based Ishdeep Sawhney, Banihal.com aims at bolstering the liberated Indian’s endeavour to override traditional methods of finding a life partner and helps them define exactly whom they’d like to spend their lives with. “We took neuroscience research from the last decade to guide our individual outlook of the world, and then selected the important questions that can predict compatibility,” says Sawhney.

And it seems this brave new world is already shaping up with many on their way to the altar, including Malhotra, who will soon be wedded to a Gurgaon-based girl whom he found on Banihal.com.

31 differently-abled couples tie knot
As many as 31 differently-abled couples from different parts of the country were wedded in a mass marriage ceremony organised by a charitable society in a west Delhi locality on Sunday. Most of the young men and women who tied the knot had met during the course of free-of-cost corrective surgery at the society’s Jaipur hospital, said Prashant Agarwal, President of Narayan Seva Sansthan, which hosted the event. As many as 51 altars were set up at the wedding site in Punjabi Bagh. Families and friends of brides and grooms joined the celebrations amid gaiety. The couples were presented household items at the time of Kanyadaan ritual. A total of 51 couples, including 31 physically challenged ones, from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh, were married. Earlier, the organisation had organised a mass marriage in which 92 pairs were wedded at Ramlila ground in June last year, Agarwal added.

(Source: DNA)