In this romantically corseted society, Ashish Chettri is as close as you get to a Don Juan.
He is an irrepressible flirt: a skirt chaser who claims to pursue three women at a time, a loquacious utterer of compliments, a ceaseless seeker of dates.
And that is just with his thumbs.
Like many Indians today, Chettri is a solely cellular Casanova: a suitor who flirts brazenly by text message, but rarely, if ever, in person.
Text messages have become an integral part of courtships in many countries. But the short messaging service, or SMS, is proving particularly revolutionary in India, where it is paving a way for the young to maneuver around deep-rooted barriers to premarital mingling.
For young, middle-class men like Chettri, who still bear the burden of making first moves, the challenge is to interest women without most of the options available to the Western man.
The Western flirt might banter with a woman at a crowded bar. He might suggest that they find a quiet place to “talk.” He might then ask the woman out for a meal at a restaurant. Should closeness develop, he might soon invite her to his apartment to have a “drink.”
Good luck trying that routine in India.
Dating of any kind is minimal in the countryside, where two-thirds of Indians live. In big cities like this one, posh bars and clubs attract a relatively small Westernized elite who date as if in Paris or New York. But for middle-class men like Chettri, much persuasion is required even to induce a woman to have coffee with you, and that may be as far as it goes.
If a text suitor makes it to the next step, say an invitation to the movies, new challenges arise.
“She will come, but she will come with two, three friends,” said Vaibhav Shingre, 25, a coworker of Chettri’s and his wingman of sorts. “You have to specify, ‘Please come alone.’”
Because many young Indians will marry only someone their parents approve of, and in some cases choose, much of this text messaging is recreational.
Young Indians, girls especially, are taught not to show any interest in the opposite sex. The prohibition extends to such behaviors as giggling at a man’s jokes. Jo hansi, voh phansi, goes one old Hindi staying. (If a woman laughs, she is already in the net.)
Most young, middle-class Indians live with their parents, leaving few opportunities for trips back to “my place.” They often share rooms with siblings into their late 20s, making it hard even to speak privately by telephone. And should they canoodle in public, they risk being found out by ubiquitous uncles and aunts and family friends, who are likely to snitch on them.
A result of such restrictions is an enduring awkwardness between many young, unmarried men and women. But communicating by text message seems to give many of them the type of distance they need to overcome their inhibitions.
“I’m not comfortable talking face-to-face with a woman,” said Chettri, 24, who is a chef at a hotel restaurant here.
Instead, when he goes out with groups of men and women, he makes mental notes about which women he would like to know better and later gets their numbers through friends. He approaches each target anonymously by text message for several days.
If a woman shows interest, Chettri discloses his identity, raises the temperature of textual provocation and, in many instances, persuades her to meet him in person.
“I start with ‘I admire you,’ then I ask her for a movie, then I ask her what happened during the day, then we start teasing and all,” he said.
What kind of teasing?
“I may call her fat,” he elaborated. “They like it. That’s why they reply. Then they start teasing. Slowly, slowly it happens that you meet.”
In one recent episode, he fixed his gaze on a neighbor. He sent her a message anonymously. He said he admired her. Eventually, he unmasked his identity.
“Thank u for admiring me!” she wrote back. “But u know wat i feel dnt u think dat instead of sending me msges like a thief y dnt u come up n speak 2 me openly. I mean (face 2 face) Dnt u think dat dis is a better idea? Afterall v r not strangers v r neighbours m i not right? Now the rest is upto u Ashish.”
The texting craze seems to have spread into the Indian countryside. Hundreds of kilometers inland from coastal, cosmopolitan Mumbai is the dusty hamlet of Umred. It is a staunchly conservative town of 50,000, where the young generally refrain from smoking and drinking and would never dare to stroll publicly with someone of the opposite sex.
Sonali Lanjewar, 19, a student and the reigning local beauty queen, said by telephone from Umred that texting had helped people her age communicate with the opposite sex, even if they could not follow up by meeting.
“Our parents are strict: They don’t let us go anywhere,” she said. “When you send an SMS, no one knows you sent it.”
She said she received text messages all day long, most from boys who would never say such things out loud and are unlikely to follow up on their boldest suggestions in any case.
“They try to make girlfriends on SMS,” she said. “They say, ‘I like you a lot; I deserve you; I’ll do anything for you; leave your family and be with me; you’re very smart; you’re very cute.’”
Farther east, in Jamshedpur, a steel company town, the desire to text became so fervent at one all-women’s college that students began renting burqas from Muslim shopkeepers, according to a local news report. From under the folds, the women typed amorously to boyfriends and arranged secret trysts off campus.
Prakash Kothari, India’s best-known sexologist, said some clients had begun approaching him with problems about texting.
“They say, ‘Hey, Doc, I’m receiving these SMS’s day in and day out. How should I respond?’” he said.
“If you ask me, the real four-letter word is ‘talk,’” he said. “Sometimes people are not brave enough to talk directly.”
As for Chettri, he has done enough textual flirting to read the early signs of success. When he texts persuasively, he says, the response times shorten and intimacies are more openly bared, just before he gets the text to end all texts: “I want to meet you.”
He meets, and he woos, but in the tradition-bound nation he has few illusions: He knows before long, he will be back at his phone, thumbs tapping away.
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