Dating in Delhi Update Part 1

As I shared with you, my unknown number of readers, in two previous posts, dating in Delhi is not that easy.  The city doesn’t easily lend itself to meeting new people.  Networking meetups, professional or social, do not exist.  In the US, you had many avenues of meeting people on a weekly basis.  In fact, on many evenings, you had a tough time deciding which one to attend.

We used Orkut to help set up an event where singles could meet over dinner.  I walked a fine line in many decisions that needed to be made.  There was a lot of selling that was required.  At the idea level, there were multiple issues to deal with, some of which I have mentioned already.

Profiling
Getting the right “profile” of people to attend, which has been suggested as the socially active upper middle class, if not the upper class.  It’s not just them, but then they have to be from the right part of town.  One guy I was chatting with said he wouldn’t want the West Delhi people showing up.  Now that’s too complicated for me to understand but I went with what he said.  It’s not that simple to implement of course.

By the way, the term “right profile” seems to be used in social and professional circles as I found out the other day at a professional conference.  I would fall into the “right” profile in most if not all scenarios but I don’t know if I like this whole profiling thing.  It may be a reality in such a financially diverse India, but I’m not used to thinking in this manner.  In fact, one of the restaurants I was considering for the first event was taken off the list.  Just a week before, profiling had become a major issue there.  Recently, the restaurant was even being boycotted.

Lack of Early Adopters
Nothing catches quickly in India (with maybe the exception of cricket and Bollywood – IPL became very popular in its first season!).  Everything takes time, i.e., you have to be out there for six months to a year before people even start considering you.  Even if something makes absolute sense and the need is definite, it takes time to catch on.  This may not be all that different from the US except it just feels like it is.  Everyone talks about that being the case and it is a generally accepted idea.

Foreign Concept (Literally and Figuratively)
The meetup concept is new to India, at least at the social level.  These structured mechanisms do not exist and if they do, they don’t work too well.  People are not used to meeting in this way.  Professional networking organizations do exist and some are probably fairly good.  Yet, the level of acceptance and use of meetups is very limited, if it exists at all.

Old-Fashioned Marketing
Word-of-mouth is key.  Most everything in India is through this mechanism.  This is natural, of course, and should not surprise me.  The reason it does has to do with the degree to which this is true here.  In the US, if something new comes up, many will jump on it right away.  There are many early adopters, at least in raw numbers.  They are the ones really passionate about or highly interested in the new idea or technology.  In India, the early adopters are a very small number.  I’ve seen this with technology, I’ve seen it with social justice issues, I’m now seeing it here.  India still moves slowly!

There were implementation level issues also, some of it basic event management kinds of things.  I will discuss these in my next post (really, I’m writing it right now, so it will be my next post!).