It was just another day at work. The newsroom was buzzing with story ideas. Something on politics, something on art, something on gender, and then someone said Tinder.



The excitement suggested that a sizeable population at work had secretly been on the dating app or been considering getting on it. That got me wondering. There are some great “My Tinder Experience” out there but all are from the female perspective. Possibly because not many men would want to write about the times they did not get swiped right, or possibly because the matches do not believe in going offline.



That was it. Let us do this story. It was not the first time I had been on Tinder anyway. Some months before, as a student in New York, I had tried my hand at online dating with the app. I got on it because every young person was on it. It was the “hipster” thing to do. Three discouraging matches later, including one with an escort, Tinder was deleted from my phone.



Two birds, one stone



This time the app had a dual goal. One, to get a story out on the male experience on Tinder. And two, to try my luck again.



So I started swiping right and right and right.



Girl A. Patel Chowk Metro Station. Lost. Confused. Eventually sighted a woman resembling a certain Tinder photo I had checked numerous times just to eliminate confusion. “Hi?” I asked. She later told me that she had just about gone up to another man before realising she “wouldn’t have swiped him right anyway”. After that, we met at a bar with “big banana” in the name, and yet no joke was made about it. My one takeaway from that meeting was that she loved all the “Khans”.



Girl B. Food and conversation about her increasingly all-pervading ex. An attempted second meeting and some food at a restaurant later, we discovered that all we agreed upon was “red wine”. Then there was that time when we met at a cafe to “get some work done”. Anyway, she is in Mumbai now.



Girl C. We never met. “Unemployed” and fresh out of a well-known college in London, she oddly had not much to say. Another major pain point was that she lived in distant Gurgaon. After suggesting a possible meeting, I got this last message on Tinder: “I’m not unemployed anymore!”



Girl D. She swiped me right because she had found a “fellow journalist” on Tinder, or so she claimed. However, a few seconds of pleasantries later, the messages stopped.



Girl E (Around the same time as Girl D). The last time I used Tinder to find a match. My phone buzzed during a fascinating dance performance at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi’s annual festival. We bonded over the fact that her sister and mine were in Chicago. She gave me her whole life story while I tried to out-clap others in the audience.



A day after the distracted texting at IIT-Delhi, I decided to message absconding Girl D. I am not sure why. She was the most uninterested in me. Perhaps because she seemed the most interesting to me.



“Hello.”



“Hi Sahil. I’m sorry your previous messages went unacknowledged. I missed them somehow.”



“Since you miss messages here, why not WhatsApp me?”



And I had her number.



A quick recap at this juncture. Girl A had dropped off the radar, Girl B was a mere Facebook friend in Mumbai, Girl C was employed and gone. Girl E was still around.



A three-hour sitcom-worthy WhatsApp conversation later, Girl D said she wanted to meet. It was just 11.30 pm, but she claimed she would “pass out soon”. At 3 am, I wondered what I did right.



Meanwhile, Girl E said she was “creeped out” by the “meeting someone on Tinder” concept and was not ready for it. As an aside though, we did meet weeks later. But that is a footnote to this story.



Bonding over Basa



So that leaves us with early-sleeping, half-interested “journalist” Girl D. We made an “out of the blue” plan to meet on the day after Diwali. As far as icebreakers go, her first line will remain unmatched: “I’m coming directly from work, so don’t mind my sweat.”



Since it was a first meeting, I took her to a quiet sit-down restaurant in Hauz Khas Village, instead of all the hustle and bustle of a Friday night in Delhi. Out came the waiter and tried his absolute best to sell us a dish, making us laugh in unison. A bite into that delectable Basa, and we were golden.



It has been a month and she is toying with my laptop charger incessantly as I try very hard to finish this last sentence.



