match-fixers

Have you observed these irritating popups which are graciously given free with your Yahoo mail inbox. If you are with Yahoo india, you have probably seen loads and loads of girls staring cheesily at you and beckoning you to tie the knot. They have these innocuous names like Ruchi/Priya/Pooja/Divya followed by an even more cliched Sharma/Verma/Joshi. There is one thing which has constantly baffled me about these matrimony sites. They seem to have the same poster girls for months. I mean, thats SHOCKING. If you cant get your poster girls married off in six months, you have no business running a matrimony site. Whats to happen of the other not so well qualified, not so young people. Surely there's huge money to make in the online matrimony business, if your competition is as goofy as this. I mean, the least you can do is to change the poster girls real frequently; make it appear like girls are being taken like hot cakes. Put in some artificial demand and at least make it appear like you are doing something.

However that is not the most outrageous thing about these sites. The most outrageous thing is you can create a profile for somebody else........OPENLY. There are profiles which read like " My sister is very beautiful, very smart...blahblahblah". Thats frikkin suicide baby. Are you stupid or did you forget you are next in line. The most entertaining part, of course, is the hobbies section. I mean do you really think you can fool the world with stuff like "watching sunset", "observing cloud shapes", "chatting", "reading magazines", "cricket". Why dont you just come clean and say you are a couch potato or a wastrel. Chatting is absolutely unacceptable. It is an apology for a hobby. So you pick up the phone and bitch about your boss. Wow! You're the girl of my dreams.

And this hobbies scam is not limited to matrimony sites. Any kind of application form from company recruitment to B-school applications to Scholarship forms. Everybody pretends to be really interested in everything but your GPA. So when you apply for any of these, you need to come face to face with your past life and somehow cover up the fact that you wasted away most of your life. So there is this whole genre of things which function as pseudohobbies. A few examples are
1. Sitting and contemplating about life - Indicating you are a goof-off in general
2. Watching sports - Indicating you are a general couch potato. People might try fooling you with high flown stuff like formula-1, X-games, etc. but they are all essentially the same category.
3. Politics - This means you probably read the headline written in 45 size font on the front page. Otherwise you have developed this intuitive skill and the predictive capacity of what generally happens in politics.
4. Stamp collecting - the eternal scandal. Simplest hobby to incorporate on your resume. All you need to know is that helvetia = switzerland and that england has a goofy head of queen liz.
5. Collecting matchbox labels - A little more innovative than stamps. Slightly dangerous if the interviewer is a smoker. So make sure you know some generic names.
6. Blogging - A sophisticated name for chatting. You can sit and write absolutely arbitrary stuff about anything under the sun and act like you are doing something literary.
7. Travelling - Means your parents have pots of money and you just blow it all up exploring pubs in different cities
8. Eating - This is the absolute limit. People who just spend half their life at crappy fast food joints call themselves "foodies" and act like sommeliers. These people "live to eat" to quote a cliche and they "will not trade anything for home food" to quote another.
9. Sketching and Painting - Extremely safe option. Odds are they will never ask you to draw anything and even if they do, you can always pull out a postmodernist impression of a lobster using a telephone by scribbling on the page.