Online Shooting - Week 1 - Induction

As I now decided to start my search for my ideal soul mate I have begun the process of registration into marriage matrimonials. Just with few searches on the net I zeroed in on Shaadi.com and Jeevansaathi.com. I also then tried my hand at Bharatmatrimony.com.

Of course not all at same time in the same day. The first one was the Shaadi.com where I spent considerable amount of my time filling in all the necessary details, taking time talking about myself, my partner preference, doing some profile searches etc. I then observed few patterns -

1. Almost all of the folks don't prefer people who Occasionally drinks (i.e. me)

2. Real good looking beauties were looking at salaries of 7-9 lakhs

3. Searching for partners who have self-registered narrowed my searches down to 200 of which majority weren't that good looking and those who were were from either Bombay/Delhi (and yes they had Occossionaly drinks to their habit)

That's for now. After 2 days I edited bit of my description and re-posted my profile. Here is how it goes -

Hi, myself Karthik. Something about me - I love reading novels, films are my second life and friends come the next and family is always the first especially my loving mom. I am cheerful, happy and try as much as I can to avoid getting into any arguments. I always love to maintain peace around and am also easy to get along with. I like going out on trips at least twice over a year and love hanging out with friends.

Both my parents are working as bank employees. My dad works as Senior Chief Manager in Andhra Bank while my mom is a clerk. I love my mom the most and of course dad the second best. I have been very fortunate to have such sincere and hardworking parents teaching us all the live's best values.

I always believed in getting married a la filmi style finding the right woman at right time at the right place and had told my mom vehemently that if I get married its going to be love marriage. Reality seems much more different though. I have now decided the best way to go about is through net to which I have quick access most of the times. I realized matrimonial sites are fantastic platform to look for people who have similar set of interests and ideas and am thoroughly enjoying the process of finding my wife-to-be.

I like blogging and I reel off all my frustrations or my feelings through my blogs giving me absolute peace. Am an avid movie fan encompassing all genres be it English, Hindi, Telugu, Japanese etc. Love eating food and a huge fan of Chicken Biryani/Noodles. I also enjoy reading about latest gadgets and gizmos. Am a huge fan of Apple products. That's about me in short.

Hoping to find the nice and caring person with whom I can share and enjoy the life's next adventerous journey.

I added few more photos, got my cell number registered and before anything else I created another gmail id. Interestingly my activity monitor says it's a healthy 100% and also tells me its important to maintain so.

Basically I hate caste system and am pretty much open to anyone for marriage except people of Muslim religion. Nothing against the community but just that I may not be comfortable with it. Keeping this in mind I hadn't really gone to any community specific site so far.

After a week of searching I realized everybody has set of preconceived notions and reservations with their own communities hence I have relented to put my profile there too. Surprisingly the site is much more friendlier and sophisticated, quite in the leagues of jeevansaathi or shaadi.com

Well here is my ranking of the four sites in the descending order -

1. Shaadi.com - Fantastic site, excellent search features, large database.

2. Jeevansaathi.com - A naukri.com venture is sure to get full marks. Perfect.

3. Aryavysyamatrimony.com - was expecting large crowd of gultis being here. I then realized this community is not specific to Andhra, its all over India. So I guess searching here I won't be losing much. Just registered to it today.

4. Bharatmatrimony.com - Horrendous site. After signing up, I got a call, a real call from a person enquiring all my details when I am in the middle of my work such as my name, occupation, father's name, address, etc. Every other site had an IVR with press 1 to confirm option. Secondly, site itself looks like an outdated garbage version of v1.0. Not aesthetic and not good profiles too. It put my interest off.

So far in the first one week the stats stand as follows -

Sites registered - 4

Interests Expressed by me - 12

Accepted so far - 0

Declined so far -4

Interests Expressed by others - 1

Accepted - 0

Declined - 1

I guess I will be doing this series of posts and quite frankly am enjoying the process. The whole wait time adds to the fun. Let me see if my interest levels are maintained as I go on.

Shooting has Begun!

After years of appearing unfazed and quite happily shrugging it off as a nice family joke where everybody has fun asking questions like "when, why so long, shall we start searching now, people are asking etc." the time has now come to get to the reality. This has been a post in making for almost months together now but never materialized just because I never though I would go on bride-hunt and the whole process looked very cheesy to me. The time now has come to be part of it and its proving to be much more entertaining and adventurous than I thought. Before I proceed to it I just want to recap about how this renewed interest has first begun.

Around a month back I had almost 2 hour long discussion with Mote on Skype. This was our third skype conversation and the last one during my stay at Paris. He is one guy whom I have lot of faith in and look forward to his opinions and thinking. For this particular time I poured my heart out about my thoughts on marriage. Marriage for me has always been knowing someone through months or years, understanding their likes and dislikes, and then finally tying the knot. What I really want is to get married by falling in love. If every step of your life all you do is select, why is it that when it comes to marriage you go by the traditional way of hunting a bride purely based on looks, weight, height etc. I always stuck by this reasoning. On top of that how compatible am I to accept someone , a complete stranger into the life I have set for myself.

I have been leading wonderful life so far in the last 4 and a half years since my job has begun. I thoroughly enjoyed my bachelor's life hanging out with friends, roaming around, spending lot of empty time doing nothing, downloading movies, reading books endlessly on weekends, just sleeping, not tiding the room, having binge parties on the weekend so and so forth. As the last year started ending I realized much of fun has come down and quite frankly life started becoming boring as most of folks have spread out and it wasn't that great. I started going alone to movies, started spending time all alone by myself.

This was exactly what Mote had told me. Same life cannot come back and that one has to move on. This is what maturity is all about. It doesn't mean that marriage life cannot bring back the fun with friends, it is just that life has to go on. Moreover looking around be it Chitti, Niks, Nikmo, Venky all have some or the other criteria stopping them from taking the marriage step. I had nothing in the pipeline. So what was it holding me back?

I couldn't come up with proper answer except that by next year( which was how I had planned to start of my bride hunt) I wanted to reduce at least 5 kilos and make myself fit. I know it was foolish thing to keep but reality is easier said than done. So there was nothing really stopping me and I am not looking at Post Graduation anytime soon. He again advised me to think it over and start taking steps. Finding right person requires right amount of energy and time to be spent.

We then ended the call and all the remaining days marriage thoughts weren't on my mind. The topic again took a solid shape with my recent meeting with the other alter-ego Nikhil. Nikhil, Rajavardhan and me had a nice dinner at Cafe Bahar relishing on the mouth watering kebabs and chicken biryani. Just wanting to catch their opinion I brought the subject of marriage.

Deja vu, they exactly said what Nikmo, my mom, my dad, my uncle had said -"What exactly are you waiting for? you don't have any plans yet, why don't you at least start searching?". That is when I made my decision to start the hunt. What am I losing anyway but instead would be gaining much needed distraction and engagement from my current kind of stressful life.

I came back to home and told my mom that I was ready and that they can start putting the word out to people. As expected mom got all excited and went on telling about getting the gothram done, this done that done. Since there was a huge function gathering next day in order to avoid embarrassment of people checking me out and telling me "Finally we heard you are ready" 20-30 times, I told them to broach the subject up till September 1st.

Until then I have started my own bit. Read on to the sequel,

Random ramblings

First off, when I was talking to Srinu today, he casually asked me when I was planning to marry. I casually told him maybe next year or year after that.

"2 years aa..vaddu babu..chala late aipotundi"

Then there was this one from my mom "tvaraga pelli chesuko ra. andaru oka la vundaru. kondari age avute face mudaraipotundi. Pratap chudu ippatiki koncham young ga unnadu". Mom was so darn clever. She conveyed exactly what Srinu said albeit in a circuitous roundabout manner.

I strongly believe in the dictum "If I think it doesn't apply to me, I ignore it and laugh it off". This applies to any taunting, teasing, that my friends do. It really doesn't bother me as there are too many things in my life apart from these to bother with. Age is something that has stuck a little hard.

I can see whale of difference between mushy-me and no-mushy-me and thank god for the brave step I took to take it off. Maybe back then I realize now that everything was perfectly justified when they kept referring me as looking aged, looking old etc. But now with the new look I certainly don't feel old but why do people still referring to me as old. When it comes to age, they go ballistics on hearing I am still 25 (when i was 25). They always say I am somewhere around 28, 29.

I thought I had two solutions for it -

1. Reduce weight

2. Reduce Weight

and Reduce weight

As Balodi bhai puts it "If you are slim and fit, even if you are bald you will look like a hunk". That thought put me in high spirits for very long time until someone else told me "Bhai, i think its got something to do with your shoulder length. You look okay. "

And here is where I rest my case. I am happy the way I am and the way I look.