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My father, whom I respect, love, and admire, is admittedly not\u00a0infallible. And one of the major mistakes he made where my own life is concerned\u00a0was in 2013, when in a\u00a0mood that was mixed parts\u00a0of\u00a0‘Nothing else is working’, ‘Customised service is better than\u00a0faceless matrimonial websites’, and ‘The upside could be great and how bad could the downside be?’, he enrolled me in the lists of Sycorian Matrimonials<\/a> (back then, it had not yet become Sycoriaan).<\/p>\n As it turns out, there was one upside and four\u00a0downsides. The upside was that\u00a0the whole association with Sycorian left me with stories\u00a0upon which I will be\u00a0able to dine out\u00a0for years and years. The downsides were:<\/p>\n This despair was largely because most (though\u00a0to be fair, not all) bridal profiles were very much like each other,\u00a0especially\u00a0in the following respects:<\/p>\n What impressed me over give months of reading Sycorian profiles is that whenever it came up, everyone claimed to be only a\u00a0perfect<\/em> blend of tradition and modernity. There were no\u00a0imperfect blends, near-perfect blends, ninety-fifth percentile blends, off-spec blends, or cheap-but-serviceable blends. The only parallel is to olive oil, where if you go to a supermarket you can find extra virgin olive oil, olive oil, and even that\u00a0gross pomace olive oil, but never\u00a0<\/em>virgin olive oil without the extra virginity.<\/p>\n Just as with cultured families, no explanation was ever forthcoming on what exactly a perfect blend of tradition and modernity is, and what it implies for one’s daily life. Nor was it ever explained why being a perfect blend was a desirable trait in a bride, when in whiskey blends are looked down upon and single malts are preferred.<\/p>\n RoKo and I once speculated that the modernity consisted of meeting in a five star hotel coffee shop, and the tradition consisted of getting the prospective groom to pick up the bill,\u00a0but that was just us being bitchy, and anyway, as\u00a0the months went by, I ended up meeting ladies from Sycorian even in mall coffee shops. So I eventually decided that “perfect blend of tradition and modernity” was just something that people used to fill in matrimonial profiles when they could think of nothing else to write, the way we, as Class XI students who had to come up with farewell dedications for graduating Class XII seniors\u00a0whom \u00a0we had no clue about, used to\u00a0write “Amit Kumar’s smiling face and cheerful personality will never be forgotten!”<\/p>\n So\u00a0after completely giving up on Sycorian around the beginning\u00a02014, I paid the expression no more attention until the very end of 2014.<\/p>\n\n
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