By Fiza Masoodi

Last month, I stood in the bride’s room at a Srinagar marriage hall while a young woman pressed refresh on her phone.

The screen showed a man in Muscat repeating Quranic verses after a cleric. The entire ceremony lasted eight minutes. The groom’s family had sent a plate of honey sweets by courier. The bride’s family had not cooked a single meatball.

This is the new Kashmiri wedding, marketed as halal speed-dating.

Matrimonial apps boast thousands of Kashmiri profiles. Their dashboards filter by height, salary, skin tone and visa status.

If both sides swipe right, the app books a cleric and opens a Zoom link.

In 2025, at least three hundred and twenty marriages have been contracted online, double last year’s count.

The companies call this progress. They do not pay for the counselling sessions that follow.

For centuries, a Kashmiri wedding began with a three-day wazwan feast. Relatives tasted rice from the same copper plate, judged the family’s generosity, and watched how the boy’s parents treated the girl’s........

© Kashmir Observer