UNITED KINGDOM, May 4, 2011: “Love comes after the marriage,” says Murugavel Janakiraman, the founder and chief executive of one of India’s largest matrimonial website companies, BharatMatrimony.
The entrepreneur believes it is a philosophy ingrained in Indian culture and one of the reasons Indians place more importance on matching other “various criteria” before tying the knot – “religion, language… matching the community, you need to also match the sub-community, then there’s horoscope matching”.
The long list of factors that need to be in alignment can seem daunting when it comes to searching for a potential spouse. But Mr. Murugavel says that thoroughness has made the internet increasingly popular in India as a tool for searching for prospective partners.
Mr. Murugavel says the way people marry in India has changed significantly. “It is not like 20 years ago where the parents chose the groom for the girl,” he says. “Today the parents know that it won’t work anymore.”
Instead he believes that although getting engaged is still very much a family affair, parents are “more comfortable nowadays” with their children choosing their own partner “as long as they marry within the community”. To this extent, the entrepreneur regards online matchmaking as a new way of marrying couples that accommodates both the spouses and their families.
Mr. Murugavel says he has married more than two million people through BharatMatrimony and spin-off sites aimed at different communities and in different languages. He met his own wife through the service he had created, after he responded to a profile of her posted by his future father-in-law.