Zoroastrian matrimony, one community, many cities

The Zoroastrian community is small, and it no longer lives in one place. One family can have a daughter in Bengaluru, a son in Toronto and cousins in Karachi and Auckland. Finding a life partner from within the community once meant looking around your own baug or your own town. Now it can mean looking across several countries at once.

Ushta is built for that. It is a free app for Zoroastrian matrimony where Parsi and Irani members meet each other wherever they live, and where every member is verified before they see anyone.

Why a small community needs a closed door

On an open site anyone can sign up, and in a big city that risk is spread across millions of strangers. In a small community it is not. People are only a couple of introductions apart, so word of a fake profile, a careless screenshot or a profile seen by the wrong person travels quickly.

That is why Ushta is members-only. Your profile is never public on the web: only verified members who are signed in can see profiles, and only the ones Ushta shows them. Until you match, they see your first name and the first letter of your surname, unless you choose to show it in full.

If there is someone you would rather not meet here, such as a colleague, a cousin or someone from your past, you can hide them by the phone number their account uses, in Settings, under Privacy. Ushta then never shows either of you to the other, and keeps only a scrambled version of the number. If a relative manages their profile, the account uses the relative's number, so hide that one too.

Everyone here has been checked

Nobody sees anyone on Ushta until they have shown our team a government ID and a selfie taken in the app, and had a short call with a person on our team, who asks about their community. In a community where families know each other, that check does more than keep strangers out: it lets you spend your attention on whether you might get on, not on whether someone is real.

Three a day suits a small pool

An app made for a big city lets you scroll through hundreds of faces in an evening. In a small community that would use up everyone who might suit you within days.

Ushta shows you up to three profiles each morning, chosen automatically from your preferences and theirs, and nobody on our team picks them. People who joined in the last two weeks come first, so someone new is not lost behind everyone else. You can write to up to three people a day, each a short note about something in their profile. When you have seen everyone who fits what you asked for, Discover tells you so, and you can widen your preferences.

Families, in the open

In many Zoroastrian families, parents and older relatives still help with the search, and Ushta does not ask anyone to pretend otherwise. A mother, father, brother, sister or another relative can make a profile for someone and look after it, as long as the person it is for knows and agrees. We confirm that with them on the verification call.

The profile carries a line saying who manages it, such as Managed by his father, and Ushta shows other members that relationship, never the relative's name or number. Before anyone meets, the person the profile is for speaks for themselves, directly with the other person. In your preferences you can choose to see profiles people manage themselves, profiles managed by family, or either.

Free for the whole community

Ushta charges nothing. There is no paid tier, no featured profiles and no advertising, so nobody can pay to be seen first, and a small community is not divided into people who paid and people who did not.

If you live outside India, Meeting Parsis when you live abroad covers distance and time zones. Irani families can read what Ushta means for Irani Zoroastrians, and Questions people ask answers the rest.