Ineligible Bachelors: Indian Men Living in U.S. Strike Out

Or, maybe, here's a radical thought--the next time one of these men meets someone he likes, he could ask her out.

The whole arranged marriage nonsense is a blight on the Indian community. Needless to say, it often leads to loveless marriages; further, the fact that you're making life decisions based on scant information results in bizarre situations like the consultant in the article who can't find a wife because they all think consultant means unemployed.

I can only welcome any development that forces people to change.

//Indian person. Fortunately distanced from the absurdity.

I think the comment is at least halfway tongue-in-cheek. The meaning is that there are certain disadvantages to marrying a strong-willed American woman...

Ya, I guessed that much! Just took the opportunity to clarify my stand a bit more.

I don't quite understand this attitude I've often found here of people to dissect, "try to understand", and take a swipe at what's wrong about other cultures, point out how some attributes of other cultures are so deviant and then take a higher stand, a higher ground on those issues.

Frankly, if you haven't been born and/or brought up in a certain culture, you simply will not be able to understand some peculiar aspects about it. Yes, there are good and the not-so-good aspects and takeaways about every culture on this planet. But I sometimes find the tone of such articles and some of the comments in this discussion not only mildly condescending but also biased. I was born and brought up in India by fairly open-minded and unorthodox parents. And so were many of my friends.

Correct me if I'm wrong. This is not an intelligent article, or discussion. It's in fact a very superficial look at the best. This is just an informative article and in no way representative of the large group of "Indian Men" living in the states. It beats me how the writer takes a few examples and on a respected daily as the WSJ blatantly labels it as "Indian Men Living in US Strike Out.

Why are we even discussing this here?

A more sensible interpretation is that marriage and courtship rituals ("courtship" extended to include "casual" relationships) have a heavy culture specific component to them.

I had a Canadian manager (tall handsome intelligent guy) who tried applying his knowledge of how "dating" worked when he was posted to Bangalore for a year and "struck out" all the time until one day, at a party, he got drunk and asked me "Dude, how the [expletive] do you get laid hereabouts? I've been trying to get a date for 6 months and every girl says "No Thanks". I am going crazy! ".

So I gave him a 20 minute crash lecture in how these things worked in India (and specifically Urban India) and the appropriate moves and counter moves and what they mean and how to interpret and act on them. Needless to say these "rules" are very different from the Western "dating". To his credit he picked up the 'rules of the game' very fast and soon managed to get what he wanted.

When any bunch of people get dumped into a new culture, it is fair to expect that a few of them never quite pick up these nuances. Whether that is worth an article in the wsj is a different matter ;-). I could conclude (if had never been in a Western country) "These Canadians strike out all the time hyuk hyuk",and it might even make a popular article in the local paper, but then I'd still be the idiot.

To summarize, the Indian "dating game" has very different rules, and they don't work in the USA (and vice versa). For Hackers an analogy that works is submitting perfectly valid Haskell code to the javac compiler ;-)

Due Disclosure: I am Indian, have lived in the USA and had no problems "decoding" how courtship, sex and marriage worked there.