Get your Marriage Registered!

Any work or dealing with governments department has left most of us with displeasure and uncomfort. Probably because of long waiting time and prevalent bribery. I am writing this blog to share my experience and learning about the process of marriage registration.

Marriage Registration is compulsory in India and a bill is already tabled in Upper house to make this mandatory. Please read TOI article: Link.

Hindus can get their marriage registered under Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Main requirement is both bride and groom should be Hindu and married. I got my marriage registered in Jayanagar 4th Block sub registrar office. Every area has a sub registrar office, visit the office of groom's permanent address.

Procedure and documents required are:

• Fill Marriage registration form. Form
• This is just a specimen form. Sub registrar office will give a similar form, infact 3 identical forms which need to be filled
• Three witnesses are required either from groom or bride side(blood relationship not necessary)
• Witnesses need not accompany to office
• 7 joint photos of bride and groom with white or blue background. Size required is 2B
• Age proof document. Valid documents are birth certificate, passport, 10th marksheet
• Address proof. Groom should have a valid address proof of the area at which registrar office is located. Bride can show address proof of her hometown. (not sure of vice-versa)
• Marriage Invitation card

With above documents in proper place, you can directly walk into sub registrar office and get your marriage registered and walk out with certificate with in 3  hours. There is no need of hiring a service of broker. 

There can be few changes in procedures/documents in different sub registrar office but more or less basic procedure remains the same. Main point is, this is a very simple procedure, so please don't shy away from it and get your marriage registered soon.

Facebook vs Orkut

This year's birthday celebration happened as routine as every year. 1% of friends named as CLOSE FRIEND wished by calling on my cell, other 5% of friends termed as GOOD FRIENDS texted me, other 4% called as SMART FRIENDS using their smart phones wished through trending APPs like whatsapp, viber & skype. Remaining 90% of friends did their formality using one of the craze of our generation SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES.

Little analytics showed me, compared to 150 comments i got in FACEBOOK, i got only 2 scraps in ORKUT. These numbers are not at all significant for me, but it is very much an issue for a company called GOOGLE. This is because i stay in INDIA and India happens to be its base of second largest users after Brazil. And these numbers reflect the story for ORKUT, they are loosing to Facebook on all grounds and the gap is increasing every second. Currently orkut has just 66 million active users worldwide compared to 750 million facebook users. If we drill down the history pages, we will find out that both these sites started during same time, with orkut being 15 days senior. Both of them enjoyed a good acceptance level from people but in different countries, on one hand Facebook was mainly popular in United States, Germany and France, Orkut on other hand was accepted well in Brazil, India and Japan. In India, Facebook took really a long time to make any in roads, till 2008 facebook hardly had any presence in India or to the matter in any Asian countries. But acceptance started shifting, slowing the new generation got bored of orkut and started their trail with facebook and today Google search itself tells the real story

These statistics and people behavior raises curiosity about what caused the fall of orkut and such stupendous rise of facebook, there are plethora of reason for this but the most prominent one is; orkut stopped improvising and the very need of networking sites. From its advent, apart from some paltry changes, orkut didn't bring any major path breaking change to hold its users interest. People got bored of scraps, testimonials and shared photos. Games and apps also became routine and less interesting. On the other hand, facebook not only kept on changing their look but also their features in terms of apps, interface and usability. 

Today facebook not only allows personal accounts but also allows business to create ads to target a specific demographic through pay-per-click campaigns. Its analytics division helps in putting right ads at right time on right page, to increase visibility and conversion, hence no wonder even big multinationals doe not want to miss out on this opportunity and have their pages created in facebook. 

With innovative thinking and understanding customer needs facebook has built a brand which is much more than just a social networking site. And on other had ORKUT just didn't changed much, and result is for everyone to see. Ok enough of analytics and analysis, let me login and check my facebook account and also share this blog on my timeline.