Meet Sima Taparia, Matchmaker On 'Indian Matchmaking' On Netflix
She's helping these families find their adult children love.
Netflix This year, Netflix has been killing it in the reality TV department and now, there's a brand new show streaming for your bingewatching pleasure: Indian Matchmaking.
The show is all about families who are trying to find a suitable partner for their adult children to marry, and they're enlisting the help of an actual matchmaker to do it.
Who is Sima Taparia, the matchmaker featured on Indian Matchmaking on Netflix?
Indian Matchmaking shares a look at arranged marriages in 2020.
Though arranged marriages sound outdated and offputting to a Western audience, the show focuses on South Asian culture and how this method of finding a partner to share a life with is still a tradition in other countries while following the couples who are matched together as strangers before they get married and begin the rest of their lives together.
Taparia lives in Mumbai and is called the "human Tinder."
The show dubs Taparia the "the human Tinder" because of how talented she is at matchmaking, and the clients showcased this season certainly seem to agree. She owns her own business, Suitable Rishta, and although she only worked locally at first, now, she helps people all over the world in their quest to find the perfect partner.
She wants to teach people from all around the world the tradition of arranged marriage.
Lately, her business has been booming, as she said in an interview promoting the show recently.
“I’m very busy,” she said. “Nothing has slowed down during this lockdown. I’m talking to you but in my mind, matches are going on. I’m thinking about my clients. It goes on in my mind 24 hours."
Her services aren't cheap.
It's totally possible to hire Taparia as a matchmaker, but it's definitely going to cost you. Though her website doesn't list her exact prices, it's estimated that using an online Indian matchmaking service costs about $100 for three months of using the matchmaker's database and skills, but that's just the beginning. Since Taparia gets personally involved in her matches, coordinating meet-ups and even working with the prospective couples in person, she may actually charge more like $2,000 to $3,000 for a match, especially since she's so well-known in her field.
This isn't her first time in front of the camera.
Taparia was also featured in A Suitable Girl, a documentary made by Indian Matchmaking showrunner Smriti Mundhra in 2017, which focused on what the women in these couples experience during the process of arranged marriage.
Taparia herself is in an arranged marriage.
Taparia and her husband, Anup Taparia, came together via arranged marriage when she was 19 years old, and Taparia says that that it all worked out — she's been married for 37 years.
“Marriage means compromise and adjustment,” she said. "I've compromised and adjusted a lot in my married life."
Nicole Pomarico is an entertainment and lifestyle writer whose work has appeared in Cosmo, Us Weekly, Refinery29, and more.