Indian grooms needn't scratch their heads when trying to calculate their dowry worth. A website, intending to make a dig at the system, does it for them

A 23 year-old electrical engineer from Jharkhand, who currently works in Fort Collins, Colorado, has created a website named Dowry Calculator. The site seeks tou00a0u00a0 help all the Indian aunties who love matchmaking by calculating the dowry worth of every groom. With just 10 questions about caste, age, job, education and father's profession, the site comes up with the net worth of a prospective groom. Meant to be a satire on the system of dowry, the website went viral just a month after it was launched. It became a top trending topic on Twitter India, with over 1,000 retweets, and over 67,000 people sharing it on Facebook.
Excerpts from an interview with Tanul Thakur, the creator of www.dowrycalculator.com.


Creator of the Dowry Calculator Tanul Thakur says he has
designed a souvenir for the website, a T-shirt, that will be up
shortly. 'There are some things money can't buy. For everything
else, there are in-laws' reads the back of the tee.

What were your reasons for creating Dowry Calculator?
It was a combination of three things. Firstly, the concept of dowry is despicable. It is not only sexist and treats people as numbers, but is also ironicalu00a0-- the more educated you are, the more dowry you get. Secondly, if you leave morality out of the situation, the model of dowry is interesting, mathematically. Most of the time, it's a function of the groom's age, salary, country where he is working, etc, and these things do change with time. So, I wanted to develop a mathematical model that could predict an individual's dowry worth at a particular instant and be able to change its value as the parameters in the groom's life changed. Lastly, the prospect of blending these two unrelated worlds was a fascinating proposition.