Being 32, Ratchaphon and his several siblings had created their profiles on the dating apps most popular in that part of the world: Tinder, Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Badoo, OKCupid, Thai Lovelines, Asiavibe and so on. “None of us believes we’ll find the loves of our lives here,” he told me. “But sometimes you meet someone you get along with well enough to go on a few dates.”

Most dating apps follow a Rolodex approach to matchmaking. Profiles of persons of the gender you prefer to date will be shown to you as though they were cards. Each card contains photos, self-descriptions, keywords, likes and dislikes and so on.

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To dismiss an unsuitable profile, you merely swipe left, while a right swipe signals interest in a person. If two people swipe right on each other, it is joyously declared a ‘match’, accompanied by sound effects, digital bells and confetti. You will be free to start a conversation now.

The other day, swiping through the profiles in Thai Lovelines or one of the other dating sites, Ratchaphon saw a line he had never encountered on a dating profile: Indians and Muslims, please swipe left. It is baffling because one is a religion and the other a nationality.

“Specifying your preferred ethnicity, religion, country, language and other metrics is standard practice on dating sites,” he said. “But this one went beyond that. I felt like someone had spat in my face.”

The disturbing and embarrassing invitation for Indians to leave the party seems to be becoming commoner, especially going eastward to countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. I have no comment on the religion, but as an Indian, I have a single question: how do Indian men behave with far-eastern women to provoke such strong antipathy?

It’s easy to be a scoundrel when your victim can’t see you or get back at you. Dating apps set the stage for misdemeanours in many other blatant ways. The speed with which you can browse through profiles creates the ethos of a marketplace where you can inspect as many designs as you like before choosing one (or none). A profile, with scanty, cryptic information about the person, encourages you to judge a book by its cover, turning both men and women into commodities in the process.

Dating apps enable duplicity; a 2018 survey of 658 college students found that 73 per cent of them kept a few ‘backburners’—relationships they could switch to if the current one became too boring or did not work out.

Your online dating profile can be an entirely fictitious persona replete with stunning, AI-generated photos. You can fake your location, age, achievements, hobbies and opinions. With Google Translate, you can discuss nihilism or cuisine with a Chinese man or woman in their 
own language.

More than anything, you can be obnoxious and disgusting online. You can get away with gutter-level statements, knowing that you are untraceable, unindictable and immune. 

How do Indian men behave on online dating sites? I’d have to be a Thai or other foreign woman to know the real answer, but from conversations with Thais and forays into Reddit, I have reason to believe that these sites bring out the worst in some of us. Here are a few glimpses into what enough Eastern women have come to expect from enough Indian men to sound an alarm. 
— Indian men assume the conversation is a prelude to sex. They will ask for X-rated photos within a few sentences, and offer to share 
their own.
— They show little interest in the other person’s life and times. Between themselves, I have heard them openly denigrate citizens of their host country, describing them as inferior and stupid. A woman can soon figure out if a man respects her or not.
— They will not hesitate to ask intimate, disrespectful or sexually tinged questions to a woman they barely know.
— If a date ensues, they will go cheap, picking some inexpensive, average eatery to cut their losses in case things don’t go well.

The most cringe-worthy tale I have heard is about three of my countrymen who decided to hit the red-light district of Bangkok once the day’s sales conference ended. Soon enough, they found a sex worker and learnt her price for an hour of 
her time.

After a confabulation, the leader of the group began bargaining. Would she be open to taking three customers for the price of one, he asked. “We don’t need much time,” he said. 

“We’ll pay for 60 minutes but each needs no more than 20 minutes.” 

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper