You’ve spent hours on those apps – swiping left and right. Playing with your destiny, gambling away the hopes of your ancestors over strangers that mildly amuse you. While looking at older pictures of your parents, you wonder how they did it. You hear of them meeting someone at a social occasion, and in one glance, declaring them the love of their life. Within a year, they got married, had children, and continued to live with each other despite sharing exactly nothing in common. You watch them grow old and wonder – how did they do it? How did they stay together for decades and bring us into the world?
Sorry to break it to you, but the magic ingredient was arranged marriage. Compared to the more glamorous cousin– ‘love marriage’ – arranged marriage is often smugly judged. To the unbiased alien from Neptune, arranged marriages come with their own pros and cons. On one hand, there are two families supervising the chaos of a wedding. There’s someone to plan and execute everything for you. There’s an ancient system that does the background research on your partner, ensuring that you’re not marrying into a Burari family of psychopaths. When cracks appear in a marriage, an army of relatives will show up with glue and tape and stitch up the marriage for the world to envy. At the same time, you have to tolerate relatives, their tantrums, and their idiosyncrasies. Fulfilling everybody’s wishes makes the entire wedding a very costly affair.
I have neither studied tech nor business. But if necessity is the mother of invention, this idea is the distant aunt who visits you once in five years and slathers you with sarcasm. We need an AI-driven app for
arranged marriages. I am aware of those sites – HindiMatrimony, TeluguMatrimony, and JavaMatrimony. But what we need is an app that makes the best use of artificial intelligence and dating apps – and combines them into a mix of convenience and tradition. An app that gives you all the benefits of an arranged marriage, with the choice of choosing who you wish to ruin your life with.
When you open the app, you’re met not only with pictures of the candidate, but their family too. Instead of brain-numbing questions like ‘beaches or mountains?’ – you’re asking important, relevant questions like ‘where would you want to live after the wedding’, or ‘how much dowry to NOT take?’. If you’re interested in a joint family, a nuclear family, or a joint-in-a-nuclear kind of family. You have filters for mama’s boys and daddy’s lil princesses. If the family is rude, their ranking drops based on a common points system.
Of course, every app needs a premium feature. For a nominal price, AI will do all the grunt work for you – finding a venue, fixing the dates, and making it seem like it’s all compatible with horoscopes and palmistry. The complete gamut from dosas to doshas. Precise information about the family – how many annoying kids ask for phones to play video games? Judgmental relatives will be slotted together so they can judge each other throughout. A celebrity will be asked to dance at the wedding, but refrain from expressing geo-political opinions. Baaraats will take the shortest route based on real-time traffic updates. A 24/7 call centre that provides annoying relatives with vague answers. At the end of the wedding, relatives who caused trouble will be sent a QR code to donate to the newlyweds.
And finally, the world will be rid of the soul-crushing darkness of dating apps. And we can all move on to settle personal scores in an AI-organised arranged marriage. So, sharks, would you want to invest `72 crore for a 2 per cent stock in my idea?
(The writer’s views are personal)