Everything you say about India is true, and its opposite. For the record, i can safely say that arranged marriages without the couple even meeting were common

Everything you say about India is true, and its opposite. For the record, i can safely say that arranged marriages without the couple even meeting were common in my parents generation upto the 60s, became unusual in my generation (I don't know of any case in my family) around the 80s/90s and now would be unimaginable in my children's generation. This is a mostly (but not completely) urban middle class experience, spanning a very large family in north and west of India. Things are different in the North vs the South, rural vs urban, poor and rich, different religions probably and so on. We are probably the most heterogenous society on earth, so this is not surprising.