Fat pay packets, junkets and lavish lifestyle have made Information Technology professionals the most sought after in the matrimony market, leaving others to sweat it out to win a bride.

"Until a decade ago, there was a great demand for grooms in banking sector as it was considered a secured and peaceful job. But today, the IT men are the hottest in the marriage market," says Murugavel Janakiraman, CEO of bharatmatrimony.com, a leading matrimony portal.

While men generally settle down for a good-looking, educated and caring bride, women look forward to a spouse who is well settled, capable of providing financial security. With bulging pay packets and soaring career graph, the IT grooms are the ideal choice now, he adds.

According to a recent survey, about 70 per cent of youngsters prefer arranged marriages, leaving their parents to have a major say in matrimonial matters.

Surprisingly, grooms with government jobs are no more the favourites of elders and IT professionals have now become their blue-eyed boys.

Shanmugam, a marriage broker, says people are even prepared to spend beyond their capacity on a lavish marriage and extra dowry for a groom in the IT field. Showing a bunch of biodata and horoscopes, he says about 70 per cent of them belong to IT professionals as the "demand" was very high. They are the popular choice even for girls in non-IT sectors, he adds.

At the age of 24, an IT professional can easily afford an apartment, car and a comfortable living, which may be an uphill task for his peer in any other field. Shyam, a diploma holder working in a non-IT firm as systems engineer with almost nine years of experience, has been drawing a "decent salary" of Rs 16,000 per month. But, he learnt the ground realities the hard way when he started searching for a bride two years ago. "I was looking for an engineering graduate but I realized that my salary is not good enough to win a bride as the expectations are too high in the marriage market," he says.

Pointing out that even freshers in the IT field are drawing around Rs 20,000 per month, his friends are advising him to switch over to that sector. Now in his late 20s, Shyam has joined part-time BE course to get a bride at least if not an IT job.

The case of Ramachandran is no different. Working as a sub-editor in a media organisation, he is earning Rs 13,000 per month. "I've posted my biodata on matrimony websites, but the response has not been encouraging. And the very first query that raises is about my monthly salary," he rues. He feels educated well-salaried girls have now become out of reach for ‘commoners’ like him.

Though the IT boom has ushered in economic empowerment of lakhs of youngsters, it has also created an imbalance among the youth as privileged and under-privileged, he remarks.

Courtesy: Expressindia.com

Google will tell Brussels it needs to hold on to users' search data for up to two years for security and commercial reasons after being warned it could be violating European privacy laws by doing so.

The world's top Internet search engine on Friday said it would respond by June 19 to a letter from a European Union data protection advisory group expressing concern it was keeping information on users' searches for too long. "The concern of EU law is that a company that collects data on its customers should keep it as long as it is necessary, but not longer," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a telephone interview.

Google shares were untroubled by the warning, rising 1.7 per cent to $482.26 by 1456 GMT. With every search, Google gathers information about a customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers, but the company stresses it never passes it on.

Google last week received a letter from the Article 29 working party, a group of national advisory bodies that counsels the EU on privacy policy, which asked the company to justify its data retention practices. "I will tell the working party that Google needs to hold on to its log database to protect itself and the system from attacks and refine and improve the effectiveness of our search results," Fleischer said.

He said Google, at its own initiative, had decided in March to limit the time it kept engine search information to between 18 and 24 months. The company previously had no set time limit. He called on rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft to clarify their data retention practices and policies.

"Will the working party focus on other players in the industry?" Fleischer asked.

Courtesy: Expressindia.com