Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/us/07religion.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
When Pouroo Dorabshaw flew to Los Angeles four years ago on a business trip, her mother urged her to visit a family friend just outside the city. The friend, it just so happened, was having a party the night of Miss Dorabshaw’s arrival. There was even another guest who could drive her straight from the airport.
So through two hours of gnarled freeway traffic, Miss Dorabshaw, a corporate trainer from Ohio, sat beside a California accountant named Yazdi Dastur. They quickly discovered they both were Zoroastrian by faith, both Indian immigrants to the United States by experience, both signed up for a conference on telemarketing.
Over the course of the party that evening, Mr. Dastur asked Miss Dorabshaw if she was interested in visiting Disneyland the next day. (No thanks, she had already gone.) Then how about Universal Studios? (Sorry, been there, too.) But there were some new attractions there that surely Miss Dorabshaw had not seen.
At about that persistent point, or maybe over dinner the next night at Red Lobster, the realization crept over Miss Dorabshaw that all this coincidence was not coincidental at all. It turned out that both Miss Dorabshaw’s mother and Mr. Dastur had used the same matchmaker, a retired nuclear physicist in suburban Chicago, and the entire intent of the weekend had been to nudge two unmarried Zoroastrians on the road not merely to matrimony but endogamy.
Exactly that happened on April 7, 2006, in what Mrs. Dastur (as she now is) believes to have been the first Zoroastrian wedding ceremony in the history of Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, the matchmaker, Roshan Rivetna, moved the papers with the Dasturs’ personal information from her active files into the folder containing about 50 other successes.
All this social engineering defies the American model of romantic autonomy, love-for-love’s-sake, which reaches its commercial apex a week from now on Valentine’s Day. It also goes beyond the sort of formal and informal matchmaking that is common within dozens of religious and ethnic communities. For the small and shrinking Zoroastrian population, both in the United States and abroad, the voluntary efforts of brokers like Mrs. Rivetna are driven by the imperative of survival.