Recession ends lure of dating game

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Recession ends lure of dating game



New Delhi: There was a time, in Punjab, north India, when any Indian male returning from the west - the UK, US, Canada, Australia - to find a pretty bride back home would have hordes of gorgeous women queuing outside his door, desperate for marriage, no questions asked.
The man's appeal was extrinsic, namely, the chance to escape poverty and hardship for a better, more comfortable life abroad.
He used to swagger into town, knowing that in the arranged marriage market he was king and could take his pick. For the parents of eligible girls, his ranking was far ahead of any homegrown Indian.
Next in line were the professionals who worked in India's booming IT and software industry and call centres. Their salaries, promotion prospects and chances of overseas postings made them very desirable.
Marriage market



The global meltdown has changed the rules of the mating game. With job losses and insecurity raging in the west, suddenly the humble Indian government employee has become attractive once again after years of languishing as a country cousin to the 'fat cats' of the marriage market.
"I want someone with job security for my daughter. What's the point of a big salary when it can disappear any day?" said Paramjit Bhansal, the mother of a 25 year old daughter in Ludhiana, Punjab.
Indian doctors have always commanded a premium as potential spouses. The dowries they demand are gigantic. But now teachers and people such as state-owned bank managers have acquired a new sheen.
"I've got a lovely engineer from California registered with me. We lined up some meetings for him but nothing has worked out. Families say they don't want to take the risk of sending their daughters to the States," said Shalini Kumar of Kumar Marriage Bureau in New Delhi.
Asha Patel, 27, who works in Delhi as a PR professional, is registered with a matrimonial website. As part of her profile on the site, she had stated clearly her preference for a man based in the US.
"My cousin works as a banker in New York and lost his job before Christmas. It made me think again about my priorities. I've decided it's OK to find someone here who has a solid job and comes from a nice family," said Patel.
Parents also tend to believe that India, with a project economic growth rate of 7 per cent this year, is still a far better bet than western economies which have been far more badly affected by the recession.
Apart from the global slowdown, horror stories abound of girls joining their husbands in the west to find they are already married or lied about their careers or financial status.
Cases of fraud
Engineers turn out to be taxi drivers. Homeowners turn out to be tenants. These cases of fraud have also played a part in turning the tide against Non-Resident Indians or NRIs.
Mrs Bhansal, a garment exporter, knows scores of families in Punjab who have discovered, on sending the bride to join her NRI husband in the UK, that he had lied.
"At least if the boy lives in India, we can check out his background and see if he is genuine. Earlier, the gamble of finding an NRI husband might have been worth it but now, with things so grim there, it's better to avoid it," she said.


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NRI men’s marriage prospects hit by glob

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NRI men’s marriage prospects hit by global slowdown
MUMBAI: With a good education, a well-paid job abroad and career prospects, the expatriate Indian male was once a prize catch for any family back home looking to marry off their daughter.
But the effects of the global economic downturn have made hard-working foreign-based Indian accountants, investment bankers, software engineers and their ilk less of an attraction for prospective brides in India.
According to some of the many websites for arranged marriages here, interest in non-resident Indian (NRI) men has fallen sharply since the crisis began.
“With today’s families, because of the global meltdown and jobs not being secure, the contact with those boys has gone down by about 15%,” Vivek Khare, senior vice-president at www.jeevansathi.com, said.
A similar phenomenon has been seen at other websites, high-tech versions of the age-old practice of registering the credentials of young men and women at a temple for other families to inspect and choose a suitable match.
“Since the global slowdown, we have registered a 20% decline in demand for NRI grooms,” the chief executive of www.bharatmatrimony.com, Murugavel Janakiraman, was quoted as saying by Mumbai’s Midday newspaper.
“With financial institutions shutting shop and companies declaring bankruptcy, this was inevitable.”
“Recession has left parents in deep thought before they browse the NRI sections in matrimonial ads for their daughters,” Varun Rana, of www.gatbandhan.com, told the same publication.
India has been relatively sheltered from the worst effects of the global downturn, although growth — which had been running at more than 9% last year — has slowed, putting the brakes on manufacturing and services.
But Indians have been hit abroad, as many NRIs work in the US investment banking, telecoms, finance and software sectors that have borne the brunt of the slump.
Concerns have even been expressed here about how India will re-absorb a possible wave of returnees made redundant from their overseas jobs, particularly some of the estimated 4mn Indians in Gulf states.
Vibhas Mehta, business head at www.shaadi.com, suggested that the shift in interest from NRIs to Indian-based men was not entirely down to recessions in foreign economies and that shifting social norms could also have played a part.
“With promising careers, independence and the need to spend more time with one’s family, some of the eligible Indian women are not looking to move abroad after marriage,” he said.
“Also, despite the slowdown, jobs in India are still secure, which is one of the reasons why Indian grooms are in higher demand than NRI grooms.”
Stability was now the key, he added.
With analysts predicting an upswing in the world economy in early 2010, both Khare and Mehta predicted that male NRI professionals will eventually resume their place at the top of the tree.
“When it gets back to normal they will be in great demand. But at the moment people don’t want to take a chance. They want to stay in India,” Khare said.
Mehta added: “We don’t think this will last forever. Numbers will improve once the economic situation stabilises globally and we should be seeing a positive disposition in people’s attitudes towards NRIs in general.” – AFP



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