Since an early age, India's youth experience a bizarre tradition of witnessing their somber families turn into complete madcaps when it comes time to plan a wedding. Because for them, it's not just the blossoming of a new relationship between two people. It's actually a marriage between two families. Fortunately for four Harvard Business School graduates, they seem to have struck a goldmine by creating a new matchmaking mechanism for the country's $25 billon wedding industry.
It comes in the form of easyBiodata, a new website that digitizes an age-old document that's integral to the Indian process of arranging marriages, NBC News reported. By giving a chance for families to screen personal profiles before meeting with prospective partners for their children, the "biodata" includes informative details about the potential match -- like height, skin tone, academic achievements, and career, but also about his or her family -- such as a breakdown of jobs held by the extended family members.
In just a few minutes, users are able to create a free, formatted biodata online, rendering it shareable with an auspicious click. "We call the [biodata] a résumé for marriage, essentially," explained Allyson Pritchett, 29, one of the site's co-founders. "It's the first impression people get to make on the person they are hopefully going to be with forever."
The initial idea for the "arranged marriage" website was triggered by classroom conversations between Pritchett and her seat-mate, Pratik Agarwal, an electrical engineer from India, who entertained her with anecdotes about a difficult process to find his own spouse. "I didn't really understand why anyone would want to do something like that, but as Pratik explained that in India, a person's community is brought in to help to search for the right person, it became something really different to me," admitted Pritchett.
However, it was the requirement of an HBS course that eventually drove the two to formalize the conception of easyBiodata. "Pritchett and Agarwal joined forces with a clutch of other students-including Peter Luptak, a former McKinsey consultant from Slovakia and Yu Kakitsubo, a Japanese finance professional-to create a full-fledged idea and website, then scored fourth place in a course-wide competition (out of 150 teams) for their quirky service: a free, user-friendly platform, dedicated to creating professional-quality biodata profiles for prospective brides and grooms," according to NBC News.
"A lot of people aren't very happy that their parents are representing them," said Kakitsubo, 28, highlighting the fact that biodata construction, traditionally speaking, falls under the domain of well-intentioned but oblivious parents.
At the time of launch in 2013, the founders believed that a significant portion of their audience would be from an older demographic, leading them to include a magnifying glass feature. But youngsters seem to have also gotten on the modern boat. "As we got into it, we realized that it's young people that are using it. With easyBiodata, they can create their own profiles but they'll still choose to put their parents' contact info on the form to keep them involved," Kakitsubo added. "Our service is something that's in between the traditional and the new."
Meanwhile, Pritchett, who wasn't very aware of Indian culture, claims to have happily taken it on. "[easyBiodata] has changed the way I look at my own dating process," she said. "If I'm seeing someone, after a few months, I say I need to introduce them to my family and get a sense of what people think of him and vice-versa," she continued. "For me, marriage should be about something that's more than just the individuals."
For now, it remains to be seen how easyBiodata will fare against the world's largest matrimonial website, Shaadi.com, which permits Indians to post their profiles and responses including horoscope, caste, language and religion.
