Jayanti Jha, Milan Marriage, Patna

When Jayanti Jha, Founder of Milan Marriage, told YourStory that Abhigyan Shakuntalam was amongst her favourites plays

it came as no surprise. You could well imagine her lost in the words of Kalidas, conceptualising a way of bringing together both sides to end their stories happily ever after.

Jayanti Jha began her life as a simple girl surrounded by conservative forces and negative attitudes as is quiet prevalent in Indian societies. Her flight of freedom was pulled down by these very forces of society. She dreamt to break away from these shackles. A wild dream to become an entrepreneur was even more daring and exciting to her.

She started giving shape to her thoughts while she was in Intermediate. As a young girl she noticed that in our society marriage was seen to be the most important event in the life of an individual. The search for the right match for the girl or boy is a humongous task. Therefore, she came up with the idea of starting a marriage centre which would ease much of the efforts.

Milan Marriage Center finally came up in Patna in the year 2001. To begin with, she started looking for perfect matches for her own relatives and friends. Then with word- of-mouth publicity she gradually made her foray into this profession. She managed to gather a small seed capital of Rs. 5 Lakhs for the center's initial development.

She wanted to deliver society from the shackles of prejudice and rudimentary dogma. People thought that a young girl was incapable of suggesting a match for their children. There were those who tried to discourage her but Jayanti Jha always had a reply, "It's not age that will matter in finding good matches for your children. One just needs to have an eye for match making."

"I never gave up, no matter how much discouragement I received I never lost my inner strength, as I am person with lots of positivity."

According to Indian culture, it is believed that it is the duty of the bride's parents to initiate the search for a suitable groom. Keeping that in mind, Jayanti began by picking up profiles of girls looking for the prospective match. Unexpectedly, she found several parents of eligible bachelors asking her for a fitting match. Her hard work and perseverance was now bearing fruit as the number of profiles increased.

The mantra for success of Milan Center is its focus on "People's satisfaction". Milan Center provides a comprehensive network with details of the brides/ grooms in all cast and religion all over India and abroad. Jayanti takes personal interest in each profile. This is the reason that she and her center have gained respect from everyone. She has been unable to build a large customer base but life long relationships!

Her vision is to simplify the tedious process of looking for perfect match by the parents through Milan Marriage Centre in India and abroad.

Gradually she has been able to expand to Mumbai and Bangalore. Milan Center currently employs 11 people and shows a very promising annual growth of 45%. Milan Center plans to expand to two more locations – Delhi and Ranchi (Jharkhand). At the same time they will try to make a database from the smaller cities of India and abroad to diversify their reach.

YourStory asked Jayanti Jha to impart a few words of wisdom to help us in our individual walks of life.

"For any business to grow the most important thing required is devotion. Hard work with devotion oriented towards results can give success to all."

To end, she quotes her favourite line from Robert Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', "But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/ And miles to go before I sleep."