Speed Dating in India - Events that have taken place in the Past

Speed dating is a relatively new phenomenon in India. In a land where arranged marriages are still the norm in a majority of families and matrimonial decisions are rarely taken without the involvement of family elders, not surprisingly speed dating is restricted to urban centers and the upwardly mobile classes. Mumbai and Delhi are the cities where most of India’s speed dating events have taken place till now.

Speed dating is a special form of matchmaking where a singles gather at one place and have the opportunity to meet around seven to ten other potential partners all in the span of one evening. This is possible only because each couple is given a very short time to get to know each other which may range from three to seven minutes. Couples reel off questions to one another and based on the other person’s responses, mark each other on a scorecard. At the end of the speed dating event, singles hand over the scorecard to the organizers and if a mutual interest is noted, the organizers help the couple to contact each other.

Speed dating caught on in Western societies sometime in the early 2000. Curiously enough, the practice has a religious origin and was first organized by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo in 1999 in Los Angeles as way of encouraging young Jewish singles to meet and marry within their community. Eventually it became a secular affair and became popular among busy singles who didn’t have the time to spend on blind dates or hanging out at bars and pubs.



From Los Angeles in 1999 speed dating took a whole six years to arrive in India. The first Indian speed dating was held in Mumbai, the country’s most cosmopolitan and liberal city. Organized by Bombayspeedd8.com under the aegis of Asian Speed D8 Company, the event took place in March 2005 and the venue was an open-air lounge bar skirting the sandy beaches of the Arabian Sea. Forty men and women signed up for the event which saw full houses for two days running and a long waiting list for the next one. Encouraged by the overwhelming response from Mumbai’s singles, Maha Khan, one of the organizers commented that India was ready for speed dating and “cities like Mumbai are ready for a safe, informal way of getting to know each other face-to-face with a view to finding partners".

Soon it was turn for other Indian cities to try out the new dating practice and next on the radar was the country’s capital city New Delhi. The same year that is in 2005, Delhi hosted several speed dating events at trendy nightclub Agni. While the number of applicants ran into thousands, only twenty men and women received invitations for a night of fast-paced flirtation. According to Gary Delal of London Nights, one of the first organizers of speed dating events in Delhi and who returned to the city from the US to build up the trend, Delhi is an ideal host for the new practice because of its demographic profile. “The guy to girl ratio in Delhi makes it an unfriendly city for women as compared to Bangalore or Pune,” he claims. Therefore single women in Delhi need a secure, non-intimidating “platform on which to meet men”. In recent years, the trend of speed dating has spread to many other popular hangouts of the city like the PVR Cinema Complex in Saket as well as Lounge bars like Athean and other venues at high end shopping malls. One of the most recent to take place was on 25 August this year at AI in the MGF Metropolitan Mall in the Saket area of Delhi.

Bangalore warmed up to the speed dating scene around four years later when in 2009 Cupid Online a dating agency under the aegis of Zeroin Management planned some of the earliest such events in the city. According to Ragesh Nair of the organizing team, it took a while for Bangalore to be ready for speed dating events since young women were initially wary of the idea. Single women in Bangalore even when they are economically independent usually prefer to go clubbing with their own group of friends or co-workers and find it difficult to walk up to a man at a pub and initiate a talk. It is for this reason the organizers had to be very careful about the kind of men they invited to speed dating events. However Nair felt that owing to the very limited socializing opportunities available to the city’s young female singles, speed dating events were bound to become popular since they would enable the women to meet men from diverse backgrounds, professions and personalities but at the same time all within their comfort level. This factor of bringing the “right kind of people” figures very strongly in Indian speed dating events and perhaps why the practice is still a very niche phenomenon. One of the most recent speed dating events to be held in Bangalore was in April 2010 at the Taj Residency where the cost for a confirmed booking was 4999 INR.

Yet another Indian city which had made its mark on the speed dating map is Hyderabad. One of the first such events to take place was on 1 August 2008. The venue was the Café Coffee Day Lounge at the Jubilee Hills Lounge in one of the most up market areas of the city. The event included twenty male and female singles who had around 80 minutes to interact with all the members of the opposite sex and precisely four minutes for each. Ever since then SpeedDatingHyderabad.com has hosted other events, all of which have been a hit with the young singles of the city.

Speed dating in India is largely strictly limited to urban cosmopolitan centres and there too, only very definite age and class groups form the target audience. Still in a culture where sizing up a prospective life partner in a few minutes is commonplace, as evident in arranged marriage negotiations, speed dating might not be such an alien concept after all.