"I think maybe I'm a racist," writes Charu, 31, 14 kilometres away, active 2 minutes ago. "I only want 2 fuck u coz u r white."

Before I can decide if it's racist, or if I care that it is, she's into her right-swiped list of conditions.

"I'm married," she types, "so if I do this, I need 2 know I'm going 2 get what I want."

"Which is what?" I fill into my next blue text bubble, tapping again on her photos, confirming not only that you can't detect a maybe racist by appearance, but that her appearance is rather pleasing.

She responds immediately:

"Choking. Spanking. Spitting. I need 2 know if u r up 4 it."

I'm not quite sure I am, so I stall. "Anything else?"

"I want u 2 pee on me. R u into that?"

Well if I am it's definitely not happening at my house, I want to say.

"Let me think about it," I type, wondering what I really think about it.

It's not Charu's immediate post-match dive into depravity that's made me uncomfortable -- this sort of dirty bird pops up every so often on social media -- it's the bluntness of her sexual Occidentalism.

Look, I've lived as an extreme racial minority for the majority of my adult life, and being a straight white man dating in non-white lands rallies from what Louis CK would describe as "a huge leg up, are you kidding me?" to being mistakenly identified as one of those "walking ATM" expats that I'm definitely not, to once having a woman on the street come up and spit on me. In a very un-Charu kind of way.

Over my 15 years of peripateticism on five continents, meeting women in the usual, old-fashioned sorts of ways, dispelling the stigma of online dating has been an extended and forced attrition. I hadn't taken kindly to my friends in Bengaluru creating a shaadi.com profile that one time, just to see how many hits "the gora" would get. I made them take it down as soon as they showed it to me. "If you can't pull in real life, you're a douche-tube," went my thinking. But having never been based in one place for more than two years or so, a few serious relationships have had to be sacrificed. It's tiring, soul-sapping stuff. So after once again moving to a new city where I didn't really know any women, I was pleased at the prospect of a shortcut to finding some. And there I was, a grown man, in Mumbai, on Tinder: Impulse-driven dating app. Digital meat market. Great facilitator of race-bait golden showers.

"Are you free on Tuesday?" asks Charu.

Having established itself as the go-to sex-app in the US after its release in September 2012, Tinder migrated to India's platforms at a time it was presumed -- and as a Caravan article that year by Snigdha Poonam noted -- that India wasn't quite ready for "Western-style" dating websites.

"I remember feeling at that time," Poonam tells me, "that there was no way for dating sites to work around the nagging Indian problem of a surplus of men, whose vast and desperate presence on any online platform, one even remotely promising female company, would scare the women away."

True. There's always been too many dicks on the dance floor in India. But as Poonam explains, "Tinder put women in charge of expressing interest... It's probably the only way girls can check out (available) boys without getting into trouble."

And with daily new-user registrations up a holy-shit 740 per cent since this time last year, Tinder has burrowed itself deep into the country's conservative cultural undercarriage.

Well done, everyone. Happy shagging, then. And so it has been. But Charu's invitation reminded me of a piece I'd read in MW by Dustin Silgardo, about how men packing more melanin than me felt they weren't getting their fair shakes on Indian Tinder. Like, zero hits, bro. They certainly weren't interviewing for the job of full-bladdered loogie-hocking Dominant cuckold.

In fact, Indian men were complaining the app was broken, or corrupted by a "no matches bug". What other explanation could there be for their datelessness? "I have even tried liking heavy women and unattractive ones," one unsparked Tinder user was quoted as saying.

Huh. That's interesting. I hadn't noticed any bugs (beyond the one match, in making the kind of horrible snap judgment so frowned upon on Tinder, whom I suspect may've picked up a few pant-crabs along the way). My Tinder box was full of Indian girls. A fecund amount. Were my Indian brothers really having so much trouble with this?

I started running back through my roster, and without too much rational stretching, the angrez angle was a possibility: There was the Tam-Bram girl with super-conservative parents out to live the great white hype; the Bandra stoner who believed in karma and aliens and thought I resembled a particular denizen of Hollywood; the soon-to-be-married-off Parsi whose father would have "had a heart attack if I told him about you"; the "aspiring actress" who implied she'd send me a vaj-snap if I could get her cousin a job "at a good MNC".

So as one might -- as one should, fellas -- like having been diagnosed with a sneaky case of pant-crabs, I contacted my recent Tinder matches to see if our relations had been somehow infec--affected, by my evolutionary lack of skin pigment.

"Are you inclined to swipe right on a white guy more than an Indian?" I asked 28-year-old Sonali, a friend whose being on Tinder had initially made me consider that the whole thing might not just be for douche-tubes.

""I would lean towards the white guys," she said, "the good-looking Indian ones tended to be very 'Delhi': wanky and over-privileged if they were well travelled, and boring if they weren't. The white ones were usually more fun with fewer hang-ups and better manners. Though there were stereotypes too, like the Americans who wouldn't stop talking..."

Not far off that experience was Malini, 32, 10 kilometres away, active 1 minute ago, who shared what she considered immediate "swipe-left" characteristics.

"Posing with a car. Vanity shots... A man with jewellery is a major no-no," she listed. "I make an effort to swipe Indian boys but tend to swipe more white. There's more mystery, I think. It's very easy to culturally dissect an Indian boy."

And she's been busy, about 100 matches going at any given time, but if by three figures she doesn't see anyone she's "keen on chatting with, I delete my account, go off Tinder for a week or so and then reactivate it." She's done this six times since January, and has been on only 10 dates -- one Indian, nine whites. "One led to sex and one was just heavy petting," she wrote. "Both were white."

I asked Meera, 28, 24 kilometres away, active 6 minutes ago, "if there really is this stereotype that white men will treat you better, that they won't be as judgmental?"

"That is a belief," she replied. "Indians criticize the West for their casual dates, their attitude towards relationships, divorces, etc. But at least Westerners are open about the things they do. India is the fucking hypocrisy capital of the world."

"How so?"

"Indian men on Tinder think that if a woman is on there, she is looking for casual sex and gets termed 'that' kind of woman. They want to meet, and when you do, they want to sleep with you then and there."

"Like they try to jump over the table at you?" I joked.

"Pleasantries are exchanged for less than a minute and then they ask, 'How many men have you met with from here?' which means, 'How many men have you slept with?' So if you say 'not many', or 'I'm too old-fashioned' then there is excitement, as though they have the prospect of fucking a virgin."

Oh, that kind of hypocrisy. Gotcha. Meera said at one point she used to get 25-30 matches an hour and had to turn off notifications.

Or maybe you shouldn't right-swipe quite so many dudes?

"Ok," I typed. "How many of those Tinder matches turned into real dates?"

"Four."

"And how many of them led to sex?"

"Just one. The white guy."

How 'bout I come over and spit on you Wednesday evening instead? I want to type.

She does not immediately reply.

Future ex-boyfriends of Bharat, the app's not broken. The Indian women of Tinder have spoken: No more photos of you shirtless on the hood of that car that's clearly not yours. No cheersing Sula Brut at a table of popped-collar college chums. No throwing up the devil horns with your tongue out at a rock festival. And no posing in gym clothes (that's actually a big one, guys. Desist immediately. This in no way inveigles you into a state of "IRL" nakedness). And I've been reliably informed that messages like: "You have an amazing smile, I wonder how it would be when I put my dick in your mouth," will get you nowhere. Even if you comprehend, in theory, words like "statistics" or "probability", thinking that somewhere out there in the Tinderverse is a girl who'll perk up at that line, or this next one, it's just a bad gamble to get straight in with, "Your ass is amazing, I want to just take it. I swear I will worship it."

"And then there are those self-obsessed kinds," wrote Meera, "'I work out for 4 hours everyday, I burnt 1500 calories today. I have amazing stamina. You will get tired but I won't'. Yuck."

Meera's since tweaked her profile description to include "those only interested in one thing can swipe left", as have others I've come across in "researching this article": strictures laid out for any poor bastard hoping to use Tinder for the reason it was invented: to employ your phone's GPS to find people nearby who also want to have sex, "DTF" as the character-constricted internet kids say. It's what's made Grindr, Tinder's origin-app, so popular with gay men. These guys know what they want, when they want it, and the closer you are, the quicker it comes. Bas. Done. None of this ambiguous bullshit hetero dudes have to suffer. Not that this seems to be stopping anyone, whatever skin colour they're partial to.

India is home to the largest -- thus, likely the horniest -- youth population in the world, with more active Tinder users than any other country in Asia. These Tindians have a match rate of 25.4 per cent, which for Tinder's communications VP Rosette Pambakian, "insinuates that their matches could lead to more meaningful connections."

Or that it takes a lot of fishing around to know what kind of bait will get bit.

"There are so many [women] on there that have really confrontational messages now," complained my 32-year-old Gujju friend Arjun, having noticed the Meeras of Tinder adding conditions and caveats to their profile descriptions recently. "They're like 'if you're looking for hook-ups then swipe left you fucker', and I feel that as Indians, as a culture, we just don't get it." -- his arms flapping incredulously in his jacket sleeves -- "There are times when I'm on Tinder, and I'm swiping, swiping, swiping, and suddenly I see a picture of this girl and her husband, very obviously at their wedding." Not to mention the family photos with kids, dogs, more kids, as if these fools are here just friending each other like Facebook. "Either you don't get this platform," he said, "or you really are at the fringes where you're looking to experiment." I thought I caught a twitch of interest at the idea of Arjun getting in on a little Tinder swinging. Why not? "I mean," he emphasized, "that's some kinky shit."

Well I guess you haven't matched with Charu yet, Arjun. In her case, those proscribed come-on lines above might be welcome. But no. Arjun wouldn't have matched with Charu. Our kinky little housewife is in it for the palefaces. Palefaces that'll piss on her.

I needed some perspective, some reinforcement, maybe a little refutation. Fine: I needed some comparative dick measuring about this vanilla Tindian preference. So I called someone from my Single White Male cohort, my 32-year-old American friend Thomas, in Delhi, to see how he's been making out.

"One hundred per cent of my Tinder knowledge came from friends back in the US," he said, "where the fact that sex was at least on the table seemed to be more or less a given. I anticipated that things would be a bit less lascivious here. They are."

"Do you think being white has given you any real advantage?"

"Nobody's outright said it, but a particular kind of woman often reaches out to me on Tinder... divorced women in their early to mid-thirties. Typically they had an early marriage, often arranged and often to a very conservative family and they've only managed to escape it in the past couple of years. They want to engage in the kind of wild youth they never had; or at least they think they do... These women generally imply that they're attracted to me because they're afraid they'll be judged by Delhi boys for their desire for experimentation. They choose me because of their generally accurate impression that foreigners are sluts, and therefore, unlikely to judge them."

In this regard, Thomas' peter and mine are comparably sized. In my experience, it's as Thomas says: mostly girls our age with baggage -- or bags that have never been packed -- with the odd mid-twenties out-of-towner who considers banging a whitey in India's Tropical Camelot as punching up. Thomas told me about one girl whose idea of foreplay was berating him for his "neo-imperialist, race-privileged existence", but not quite the degree of what Charu was after. Yes. Charu. What to do about Charu.

How about we meet over the weekend? I want to write her, but before I can blue-bubble an excuse as to why I've not yet wiped my shoes on her welcome mat, she's gone. She's unmatched me. Greener pastures. Spankier palms. Spittier mouths. Pissier dicks.

And I'm relieved. Because she's right. I'm really not into any of that. I engaged her for my own documentative ends and she felt it. And for all this talk of culturally imbalanced sexual mores, compared to Charu, maybe I am a little old fashioned.

I haven't paid much attention to Tinder after Charu, and consequently, Tinder has been paying less attention to me. No hits, bro. No more little dopamine blasts of self-approval. Nothing. Maybe I've caught the non-matching bug. But that's impossible. That's what losers say. I will instead defer to my friend Avantika, 32, no longer on Tinder, who gives my ego the explanation it needs. "I never swiped on many white guys," she says, "I figured they were all just here on vacation anyway."

*some names have been changed for privacy.