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Pooja Verma (name changed) was at a family function in Pitampura in New Delhi. The 25-year-old, all dressed up for the occasion, was bored out of her wits. To while away her time, she asked a cousin to click her photograph on her mobile phone. She uploaded the picture to her Tinder account. Not even a minute had elapsed when someone called Raj Anand complimented her on her picture. "Tinder tells me you are 2 km away," he said.
"Yes, I am at a ceremony."
"Then why are you on Tinder?"
"Because I am royally bored here. You?"
"To date."
Welcome to smartphone dating. Lonely? Download Tinder from www.gotinder.com. Once you are logged in through Facebook, the app shows you photographs of people in the vicinity who are using Tinder. Click on the left icon to reject someone and on the right to select a contact. If two people select each other, it is a "match" - it means you are located close enough to that person to be able to meet and chat.
The following day Verma met 26-year-old Anand at a mall.
Whereas traditional dating sites use algorithms and ask users to fill many forms, Tinder gets straight to the point, say users. Justin Mateen, co-founder and chief marketing officer, says, "Our users are growing by the thousand every day in India. We target social influencers and use their friends to stimulate early growth. We have translated the app and localised it for India."
"I felt a little voyeuristic, a little excited looking at all the photos on Tinder," says Verma. But she, like most Tinder users, is happy at having avoided other more perilous ways of meeting like-minded people. Anand says, "I have no shame in saying we met on Tinder."
Neither does Sharad Mishra. At 29, he felt his youth fading away. He wanted to "play the field" before settling down. So, he downloaded SinglesAroundMe (SAM), a map-based dating app from india.singlesaroundme.com. It identifies your location and shows the presence of other singles in your proximity on a Google map.
Mishra uploaded his profile on SAM. He was aware of the downsides of online relationships - deceptive selfies, moody dates - but he played anyway. "I would go home, lie in bed, eat and go to SAM. I would see pictures of girls wearing sleeveless summer dresses, looking fresh and sweet," says Mishra. "People are constantly on it, constantly hitting on you."
As Mishra found out, sometimes the women that men are matched with turn out to be girls looking for clients. When a woman whom he thought only wanted to chat with him asked him to create an account on a site and type in his credit card data, he realised she wasn't his soulmate.
Like all Tinder users, 22-year-old Namita Gupta (name changed) admits she loves the ego boost that comes from being matched with someone and having him message her. "Messaging first is a guy thing," she explains. "Sometimes I badly want to talk to a guy."
Gupta was matched with a boy and decided to meet him not far from their location. "If he turned out to be an ugly man, I would just run away," she thought. Posing by his bike, his face, she realised, bothered her. It was "fatter than what I had seen on Tinder. He was almost fat." But they were there, and she didn't know how to get rid of him. "I wasted the evening."
Such mismatches are clearly because Tinder favours the beautiful - or rather comely profile pictures. Says Mishra: "You have to be a looker. It's always love at first sight." And this is where deceptions are hatched. For rejections and selections depend on the picture that your profile shows.
But for people like Gupta, still wary after her fat-guy encounter, Tinder offers an advantage. It shows you if a potential selection is a friend with someone you know on Facebook. You can use that information to learn more about the person or to ensure your match is not up to some hanky-panky.
Here, the dating app Thrill available on Google Play lets women make the decisions. A girl can approve or reject the men, moving them up or down the popularity scale. If two people find each other 'thrilling', they can chat.
Before Tinder, Verma and Anand had felt the frustration of sending smoke signals through the social media. They say the signals can seem a little "creepy". But on Tinder, they are able to cast a wider net. On it, she does not waste time trying to compose lyrical messages. "Either it's a right click or a left, in or out," she says.
So are Verma and Anand boyfriend-girlfriend now? "No," says Anand. "Tinder just sets up a meeting. It's not about a happy ending, only a series of encounters, flirty or otherwise."
That is why Anand says that after he uploaded a picture of himself with a dog, he began getting more matches. But he advises, "Do not click photos with reptiles." Verma also continues chatting with others. She reveals, "A guy said our kids would look beautiful. A body builder sent me a picture of himself flexing and posing in tight nylon shorts. It was not cool."
