Mohan wrote me a Tamil love poem.

Rega Jha,
unparvai en mele vilathaa,
ne en kitta vanthu ninathaa,
en dehgam suda marathaa,
Rega Jha.

I found it in my Twitter “Message Requests.” Translated to English, the poem reads: “Rega Jha, won’t you let your gaze fall on me? If you come stand close to me, my body temperature will rise, Rega Jha.”

It’s the kind of message that, 15 years ago, I might’ve screenshotted and shared with girl classmates for a laugh. Bonding over the “creeps” in our social media inboxes was an early internet experience for us, where “us” was girl teens from affluent families, enrolled in English-medium schools, born and raised in urban India; and “creeps” were boys and men we didn’t know, who had made an overture, usually in broken English or a vernacular language, on social media.

I can’t remember my first creep, nor, sadly, can I remember how seeing that first message felt. What I do remember is being 12 and 13 years old, feeling flattered and impatient to tell my friends about my inbox hauls, anticipating their cracking up with me at every “Will u do franship?” and “Lukin nice.” I remember the crackle-beep-trill of dial-up modems punctuating sleepover giggling, PC screen glowing in semi-dark, our parents asleep in the next room. I remember comparing inboxes with prettier friends, hoping (anxiously! insecurely!) that the creeps had come through for me. And bless them, they always did. As we made our way from Hi5 in 2005 and 2006, to Orkut in 2006 and 2007, and finally to Facebook where we practiced seeing and being seen for a decade, the creeps came everywhere.

To be clear, though, Mohan is not a creep.

Mohan is a 26-year-old software engineer who sincerely wants to build friendships with women and is open to more-than, but he specifically doesn’t want to creep anyone out. When we spoke on the phone, he was pacing the terrace of his family home in the small Tamil Nadu town where he grew up, and where he’d returned last year when the first lockdown began. He told me about a girl he once messaged on Facebook with whom he ended up chatting for days. When her responses grew shorter, Mohan perceived a drop in interest. He stopped trying to keep the conversation alive. “I was definitely interested in her but I didn’t want to freak her out,” he said. “I don’t want to freak any girl out by sending messages often.”

We do tend to get freaked out, and for good reason. Mainstream Indian portrayals of heterosexual romance unambiguously charge men with initiating courtships, but they either fail to account for consent or, famously, encourage violating it. Meanwhile women, each of us having experienced a rattling array of violations at the hands of male strangers, have been conditioned to simultaneously expect to be (even long to be) pursued, and to be wary of our male pursuers. For us, this means the work of finding love is impossibly tied up with the work of avoiding danger. For Mohan and other well-intentioned men, “the problem comes in finding a border,” he said. “If we cross the border, it will feel like we’re stalking the girl. But if we aren’t reaching the border means our existence won’t be known to the girl.”

So when it comes to DMs, Mohan makes creative attempts to break through the clutter of ‘Hellos’ he correctly presumes is piling up in women’s inboxes. In my case, he’d seen that a childhood photo I’d posted on Instagram was geo-tagged to Chennai so he thought a Tamil rhyme might do the trick. “My initial thought was just to get your attention,” he told me. When I asked why he wanted it, Mohan said he saw me as a “crush.” In one message he’d sent long before we spoke, he’d written: “I love ur style & and I love ur attitude.” Genuinely flattered, I thanked him now on the phone. He laughed. He didn’t actually message me in hopes of a romance, he explained. Among his guy friends, it’s fairly normal to send social media messages to women they don’t know, “just for friendship.”

Mohan’s hometown doesn’t afford easy opportunities for men and women to befriend each other. He told me about a girl he used to see at the bus stop when he’d commute to college. They’d often lock gazes and exchange smiles, but neither figured out how to approach the other. When he moved to Bengaluru for work, Mohan was struck by the ease with which men and women would go to coffee shops, bars and overnight trips together.

“You live in Mumbai, right?” he asked me. “There the lifestyle might be much easier. Maybe that barrier won’t be there.”

I’m writing these words at a café in Bandra West. At the tables around me, men and women are laughing, chatting, rolling American Spirit cigarettes, drinking flat whites or Biras, nobody batting an eyelid at anybody else’s choice of company. Mohan was right, of course. In cosmopolitan bubbles of privilege, mixed-gender mingling is uncontroversial enough that one can forget there are towns and townships quite close by where it could fuel anything from gossip to violence. I text Mohan and ask if he’ll have coffee with me when I’m back in Chennai soon.

Just for friendship, I think as I hit Send.

Today, with 45 percent of the country online, ^[4] internet spaces look a little bit more like India always has offline: the hyper-privileged still form a disproportionately platformed minority, but marginalised majorities are watching. And they’re calling out the rampant classism, casteism, and linguistic discrimination that characterises all of elite India’s cultural output. This tradition of critique is as old as the problem itself, but social media may have expedited such call-outs reaching their targets: People Like Us.

In 2018, when a #MeToo wave swept across creative industries in India, it was Dalit writer Christina Thomas Dhanaraj who noted that most accusations were against men from dominant castes. “Dalit men don’t have caste power, yet their caste identities (when calling out abuse) are always specified as though it is their caste identity that is the cause of the wrongdoing,” she tweeted. “Why are Savarna men, despite their caste power, exempt from this custom?”

When Netflix’s 2020 reality show Indian Matchmaking became a global hit, Dalit feminists lambasted its uncritical portrayal of dominant-caste Hindu arranged marriages. “There’s no way to talk about love and romance and marriage in an Indian context without looking at the fact that our society is being ripped apart—is at the edge of genocide—primarily because we are at an unbridled moment of Brahmanism,” the writer Thenmozhi Soundararajan said during a conversation between anti-caste commentators and the show’s creator. ^[5]

For many of us born into caste and class privilege, these conversations on social media offer a worldview that was notably excluded from the syllabi of the posh private schools we were sent to: a worldview that emphasises introspective criticality about structural oppressions.

“I’ve stopped putting anything on Facebook.” Indu told me. “I don’t understand who this man is. If he finds me, what will I do?”

Researchers at the University of Chicago interviewed ^[6] 199 women across South Asian countries and found that 66 percent had faced some version of cyber-stalking—defined as “receiving constant, unwanted contact from male strangers online.” The rate of incidence was highest among Indian respondents, at 73 percent.

It dawned on me, talking to Indu, that the best actual use case of Franship: The Meme might be to confirm to women new to the internet that what’s happening in their inboxes is happening in all of ours. But Indu, rather than gleefully swapping screenshots with friends, has been secretive about the messages. In particular, she needs her husband and family to never find out. “They’ll say, now anything could happen to you, come home, get off Facebook,” she explained. “It’ll become a big deal for me at home.”

Indu’s 18-year-old coursemate—who asked me not to use her real name—is even more wary of her family’s reactions. She was the first girl in her village, also in Bihar, to get a smartphone. She got it in August last year, a day before Independence Day. Before she had her own, she’d borrow a neighbour’s phone for five or ten minutes at a time to make urgent submissions or glance at notes on days she missed classes. When she topped her twelfth standard exams, it became clear that she would be continuing her education, and so a smartphone of her own had become a necessity.

Still, tongues wagged. People began calling her “mobile rakhne wali”—a girl with a phone. “Only boys get smartphones,” she explained to me. As for what “mobile rakhne wali” actually implies: “As soon as there was a phone in my hand, people started saying, she must be talking to boys.”

I asked what would happen if she really were talking to boys. Say she liked someone in person and began messaging them, or if someone who reached out on Facebook genuinely piqued her interest. She shut the thought down: “The family’s name will get spoiled, di,” she said. She explained that in her village, just like in Mohan’s hometown, if a boy and girl are seen spending time together, “Hungama mach jaata hai.” All hell breaks loose.

For both women, having a phone is too important to risk it being taken away. Indu wants to be a social worker. Her coursemate wants to clear the UPSC and join the Bihar Police. They’d rather not discover what their families might do to them, or their hard-won freedoms—to study, to work, to be online—should they be discovered talking to men who weren't chosen for them as husbands.

Jagisha, another woman I spoke with, found out first-hand.

Niloufer Venkatraman, who co-runs India Love Project with journalists Samar Halarnkar and Priya Ramani, thinks of this negotiation between disapproving parents and ‘transgressive’ couples as “uniquely Indian.” “There’s so much emotional blackmail,” she told me. “People reach out to us saying, ‘I can’t decide whether to go for my own happiness. After all, my parents raised me for 25 years and they’ve been such good parents otherwise, now they’re saying this isn’t possible. Now what?’”

Families may be the most basic institutional unit working to prevent unions across caste and religion lines, but the infrastructure extends far behind them. Mobs of young Hindu men, quietly sanctioned by right-wing political authorities, regularly make news for harassing and threatening Hindu-Muslim couples, particularly if the man is Muslim. In the last year, states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party have introduced or passed laws that impose undue bureaucratic burdens on interfaith marriages, mainstreaming the discredited view that Muslim men conspire to dupe Hindu girls into marriage and religious conversion.

Hadiya and Shafin Jahan, a young couple from Kerala, had to appeal to the highest court of the land to confirm their individual autonomy and even the validity of their union. Hadiya’s Hindu parents alleged that their daughter was a victim of ‘love jihad’—she had been forcibly converted to Islam on the pretext of love and marriage. The Kerala High Court had declared that Ms. Akhila—Hadiya’s name when she was Hindu—was a “weak and vulnerable girl capable of being exploited.” As Jagisha had perceived at the police thana, most attacks on inter-identity unions are usually an attack on a woman’s agency.

It was in response to this increasingly divisive backdrop that India Love Project’s founders decided to launch the page. They didn’t mean for it to be a support portal but were quickly flooded with distress messages from young couples. They then tied up with lawyers who work pro-bono to defend the radically in-love against their own families.

The founders had meant for the page to be “a happy place,” Niloufer told me, and despite the hair-raising conflicts with parents at the core of every story, it is. It’s a glimpse of a different India––one in which care, curiosity and resilience fill the spaces between birth identities, rather than coinages like “honour killing” and “love jihad.” Prashant and Jagisha’s story is on there too.

In those first years of the millennium, only a sliver of India was online, and it congregated in the original meeting spaces of the unwalled internet, where AKman and AshR had—chatrooms. Richa Kaul Padte, researcher of India’s online sex cultures and author of Cyber Sexy, uses a specific adjective to refer to that era of the Indian internet: playful. “What happens when there’s playfulness is that there’s also the possibility to transgress boundaries without social consequence,” she told me in a voice-note. “It was possible to find companionship outside of the same social regulation that you experience offline.”

I tweeted a call for evidence of Richa’s observation and the stories I heard back made me sympathetic to those early-internet optimists. I heard from Ceejo and Alpa, a Malayali Christian and Gujarati Hindu respectively. They met in a Yahoo! chatroom in 1999. After chatting online for a year, they finally met in person in Mumbai, when Alpa travelled there for work. They’ve now been married 17 years and have three children.

I heard from Neil (“on papers a Hindu”) who, in 2006, while bored and browsing through a Takeshi’s Castle-themed group on Orkut, came across a display photo of a girl wearing a witch’s hat. He found her “cute,” so he went to her page and posted a Takeshi’s Castle joke. Evita (who’s Mangalorean Catholic) responded. They spoke on Orkut in publicly visible “scraps'' for a few weeks before moving to Yahoo! Messenger. From there, they graduated to phone calls. (“So expensive back then!” Neil remembered.) Four months later, Neil travelled to Mumbai, where Evita lived, “for an alumni party.” On that trip, they met in person for the first time. (“He totallllly lied about the alumni party,” she quipped.) They’ve been married 11 years.

There were more stories, all very sweet, but it’s worth noting: all were recounted in emails with near-perfect English spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

It’s a miseducation that Sonal Giani, a Bengaluru-based advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and safety, works hard to counter in herself.

Sonal regularly receives DMs (from people of all genders) that others may call out or laugh off, but she doesn’t. “I call it ‘forward’ and not ‘creepy,’” Sonal said when we spoke on the phone. Sonal assumes that the person on the other side of that message, irrespective of their gender and social position, is worthy and loveable, as any potential friend or partner would be taken to be. And she responds. Once, a message from a woman she didn’t know referenced the song Sarkai Lo Khatiya—a “tharki song” as Sonal politely put it. She went on to date its sender for five years.

It obviously doesn’t always end up that way—as a long, fulfilling romantic relationship—but it often ends in a friendship, Sonal said. Her particular method, cultivated over years of trial and error, is to respond to such messages with voice-notes. It pulls the conversation away from the realm of English-keyboard typing where so much of our discrimination plays out, and humanises both people. In her voice-notes, Sonal asks follow-up questions about the intent behind the message and she tells the sender, sincerely, about how it made her feel.

When I arrived, Mohan stood up from the corner table he’d gotten us and extended a hand for me to shake. Both of us beamed. He suggested we go order our coffees and, at the counter, said this would be his treat. I resisted. He insisted. We smiled some more.

I didn’t miss having a list of questions. It turns out we had plenty of common ground to wander through, and we wandered effortlessly. We talked about our parents—we’d both been back at their homes through lockdown after years of living away from them—and exchanged notes on how our relationships with them had changed. We talked about work—we were both at the cusp of professional transitions, so we swapped mutual motivation. We talked about cooking, about YouTube, about how our lives have wound in and around Chennai; about our childhoods, our ideas of a good life, the challenges en route to manifesting them—you get the picture, no?

We talked about the kinds of things friends talk about.