Anonymous, Amorous, Asinine, Available

You’ve Got Male: The stereo’s playing In the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning, very, very softly because this is the wee small hours of the morning. It’s 3 am, I logged onto my mailbox some four hours ago and I still have 15 unanswered messages to go. The prospect of curling up in a razai is beginning to seem very alluring indeed, but as I scroll down the list of messages, it’s harder and harder to throw in the towel. What harm can another hour do, I think? An hour later, I know. My toes are frozen, my fingers are numb from all that typing. There’s still three messages left-too bad. They’re going to have to wait till tomorrow, today evening, whatever. The blood in my veins has long since been replaced by coffee, I have a 9 o’clock appointment to make tomorrow-oops, today morning. So many men, so little time, thinks Sayoni Sen as she finally shuts down for the day, heartlessly consigning three plaintive love calls to the netherworld of messages received but not replied to. A bleary thought goes through my mind as I finally get to that elusive razai: I should’ve got myself a secretary when I decided to look for love and romance online. Or I should’ve gotten cloned, several times over, with 10 hands and four computer consoles chucked in for company. Or I should’ve had my head examined.

Name: Sayoni Sen
Age: 30
Place of residence: Delhi
Single: Y
Looking for love: Y
Short-term relationships: Y/N/Maybe
Long-term relationships: Y/N/Maybe
Looking for men: Y
Looking for women: Hmmm. That’s another username altogether
Click on Enter to continue

Like a Virgin: Where do you find romance on the Net? The answer is simple: anywhere you care to look. I start small, with the best-known singles site in India-on www.rediff.com. Post a profile, browse through some of the ones available online, and sit back. For the moment, I’m a hetero, reasonably liberal Indian working woman with a light underpinning of reasonably traditional values. It’s going to take a while before I get used to the concept that you can be anything you want to online. In the absence of two-way video connections and since I’m certainly not going the Jennicam route and installing a permanent camera over my console, nobody knows who you really are, what you really look like, whether you’re lying about the birthmark on your upper lip or telling the truth about the master’s degree from Harvard. Yahoo! Personals, sites called the datingconnection.com and a couple of other places are the logical stops on my neophyte route. It takes me about an hour all told, including mistakes, to get Sayoni Sen up on various sites.

I have no idea at this stage what to expect. "Weirdos, sickos, freaks, psychos and the incorrigibly lonely," forecasts an (offline) friend pessimistically, tapping into the most widely-held stereotypes of the kind of guys who cruise the infobahn. I figure I can expect maybe three or four responses per site. If I’m lucky.

Surprise, surprise. I log on a couple of hours later. "You have 14 new messages," Hotmail tells me. All from the rediff site-what’s the matter with the rest? I needn’t have worried. The next morning, when I log on, my mailbox is sounding just a trifle more frantic-datingconnection, Yahoo! et al have kicked in. "You have 44 new messages," it says disapprovingly. I spend the next three hours downloading EudoraPro in an attempt to restore parity. Instead of an overburdened mailbox, I now intend to overburden my hard drive. This, I reflect glumly, is my fault-I have clearly oversold myself in my profile.

It’s Not The Men In Your Life, It’s The LifeE In Your Men: Of course, there are weirdos, sickos, psychos and the incorrigibly lonely-a humungous crowd of three (okay, four if you count the guy who says he hopes I’m a grandmother because he likes chatting with grandmas). The rest? Predominantly Indian with a few Colombians thrown in for some reason I haven’t figured out. There’s a huge slew of computer engineers and guys in the software business ("I have my own stock options from the company," says keyboard_user99 proudly)-not surprising, considering that the highest levels of Internet penetration in India is in the IT business. Pilots and guys in the airline business also appear to be looking for love in all the right places. They tend to pick handles like highflier21 and eagle_eyes, with an occasional birdhit thrown in just for fun. The next biggest group seems to be guys who identify themselves as MBAs as in "Hi I’m MBA from IIMC 1994" and dudes from MNCs who identify themselves likewise. Most of this subgroup is looking for short-term relationships ("From the beginning I will make clear that my working hours preclude marriage," says MrBiceps_2000 crisply.)

And there’s the rest. I’ll get to know mainshayartonahin better over the next few days-a frighteningly bright guy who peppers his e-mails with quotations and translations from Ghalib & Co and who flirts using provocative lines from Anais Nin. Likewise, there’s the_magus, a wordsmith and dreamer who proves to be a most entertaining correspondent. Akshay from Mumbai is an unexpected bonus-a 19-year-old kid who’s looking for a friendly ear rather than for an online Spice Girl. He rapidly becomes a favourite, rivalled only by VijaiK who sends photographs of himself, jokes, posters, e-cards, e-flowers.... Imtheman makes an impact with his willingness to hang around patiently in his Bangalore office, waiting for me to join him in a private chatroom. It’s a different matter that over half these guys will mention oh-so-casually a few e-mails and chat sessions later that by the way, they’re married and their wives don’t understand them.

The majority are very clear about why they’re online. Back in India after a four-year stint abroad, Hiten Deshpande says he’s looking for a semi-arranged marriage and figures that Indian women who’re comfortable with the idea of surfing for a future lover are more likely to be what he wants than the ones in the matrimonial ads. Several guys in the computer industry say bluntly that they don’t get out much after work, they don’t meet too many women in the industry and this is the best way to "maximise" their options. The married men find the anonymity and secrecy of the Net alluring, though they’re charmingly candid about details-phone numbers, office addresses, virtual resumes, photographs, descriptions of their wives and kids, the cities they work in, all or some of these are volunteered freely in most cases. There are one or two self-confessed Net junkies. Alone of all their sex, they’re not interested in face-to-face meetings. "I fear I have lost the ability to conduct real-world relationships," confesses Birdman_Alcatraz.

Who Do You Want To Be Today? A week into the business of online romance, Sayoni Sen is more than slightly disconnected from the real world. I duck out of parties and early morning appointments in order to stay connected with "my" people; I resent phonecalls because they mean I’m going to have to get off the Net. I know, logically, that the number of responses is just a function of the Net-but there’s a primal part of me that looks at those long strings of messages and says, hey, ain’t it nice to be popular? Houston, we have a problem.

Sayoni’s male doppelganger, Aditya Kumar, has added to her woes. Aditya’s mailbox isn’t nearly as full as Sayoni’s, mirroring the skew in India between male and female Net users, but he’s still logging a lot of replies-between seven and 12 every day. It’s interesting to note that most Indian women online, either because of inexperience or because of a fatal tendency towards honesty, aren’t into clever handles. (Okay, there was I_MissSaigon, and Menaka_hana, but they’re the exceptions.) Most of them use mildly different names and confess two e-mails down the line: "I’m not really Anusuya, I’m Anuradha."

Some of the replies are frighteningly to the point. "Please send yr horoscope and photo (returnable), if pundits agree then wedding will be in March." There are some-not a huge number, but enough to keep the persistent male happy-career women online who have a great sense of humour. And some downright weirdos, like the one who asks for Aditya’s address because she wants to send him a pair of her panties (used, she adds helpfully). Aditya declines, and spends the next few days fending off a barrage of hurt e-mails from the lady. "What kind of girl do you think I am, anyway?" It’s not a question he thinks he should answer truthfully.

It’s the gay and lesbian community online that’s the biggest surprise, as well as the number of Indian couples who’re looking for a third side to the triangle. Sayoni has acquired a sister, Mayuri De, who is picking up simultaneously the most explicit and the most intelligent responses of all of them from wannabe lesbian lovers. In an attempt to keep the number of online accounts down to a manageable minimum, Aditya now has a double life as a happily practising bisexual. The online gay and lesbian presence in India is huge-and it forms one of the most supportive communities on the Net. Occasionally aggressive, yes, but wouldn’t you be if the gender of the people you loved made you a pervert in the eyes of the world?

But the strain of being three people in one is taking its toll on whatshername, or as I prefer to think of her these days, my offline identity. What’s fascinating is the way my thinking, speech patterns and responses automatically change according to how other online identities respond to me. The divide between masculine/feminine, gay/straight and even liberal/conservative in my head resembles a flimsy and completely useless curtain on some days. Will someone pull the plug on my PC before I forget who the real me used to be?

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Actually, you don’t have a choice. Whether it’s yahoochat, msnchat, the chat sites on indiaworld or nagar, from www.chatroom.com to the more, shall we say, focused, chat rooms, one factor remains constant: wherever you go, there will be at least one idiot whose idea of brilliant conversation is either "What is your bra size" or "I’m nine inches long, at rest". And those are the more printable pick-up lines. True, in three weeks worth of chatting, I did hit sites where we discussed Bosnia, books and NRI angst. It happened maybe three or four times out of an estimated 60 log-ons.

This is the bit where all your deepest, darkest fears about the underbelly of the Net come together in the form of a bogeyman attached to a thousand invisible servers. From the guy who sent an entire chatroom into incoherent rage by typing, in large green capital letters, "I HATE JEWS AND FAIRIES!!!" to the number of men, women and for all I know, four-footed beasts who get their kicks online by verbal masturbation, this is the world your mother warned you against. Most chat sites do make an effort, dividing their rooms into specific areas that range from Ally McBeal fan sites to abortion discussion areas to food and gluttony rooms. But on teen sites, specialist perversion sites, pro-and-anti Israel sites, Mensa sites, whatever, the refrain is the same.

"You wanna talk dirty to me?" "I’m thinking of you naked." "Your name is very horny." Just to check, I logged on as sayonisen, as wolfsbane, as singhkaran84, as ihatetheclintons, as ilovelaloo. No difference.

However, it’s not the smut that got to me in the end-it was the boredom. There were sites, and sessions, that were different; there were people I met online who were interesting to talk to; there was the odd session that turned into a cocktail party minus the stale canapes. Those were, sadly, exceptions to the rule. Sayoni, Mayuri and Aditya, in addition, shared one problem with their creator: cybersex just didn’t do it for them. In conversation with Sweet_n_Low_from_ Arkansas, I asked how it worked. "It’s all in the head," she typed back. "When you tell me to take off my clothes, I visualise you watching. It turns me on. Everything you say, I do to myself. Sometimes I get a lover and we do things to each other according to the script the other chatter’s coming up with."

I tried. I really tried. When Big_Boy_Burgher typed in "Aaaah!", I pondered for a moment and typed back hopefully, "Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!" He went ape and flooded the screen with an explicit, blow-by-blow account of what he was doing and what he wanted me to do. I cracked up and giggled for the next half-an-hour nonstop (yes, I had to get offline). The problem was defined for me by a writer who once observed that the two most comic acts a non-participant could watch were human beings dancing, and human beings making love. It’s all in the head, as Arkansas said. Unfortunately, my head didn’t respond to little lines of type coming up on screen, no matter what they said. But then, I’ve always thought phone sex equalled sheer comedy too...

The upside of cybersex, of course, is that you have absolutely no chance of contracting aids or getting pregnant. However, humans aren’t quite as easily satisfied, and while there’s a lot of people out there who get their rocks off on verbal (as opposed to oral, hmmm?) sex, the majority come out panting from hot encounters and demand to know when they can see you in real life.

We’re still a touchy-feely race.

An Affair To Remember: "Yeah, all right, you’re having a great time, but tell me something-what does this have to do with the real world?" That’s from an ultra-cool Net-sceptic friend of mine, and it’s a valid question. The three offline encounters I’ve set up were, well, just so-so. The one woman I met breezed in, looked me up and down and said, "Sorry, you look too femme for me. I was expecting someone more butch." She did stick around to chat, but that was the end of a beautiful friendship. Of the two men, one drooled so desperately that I was completely, totally turned off, and no, I didn’t want a dirty weekend at the Wet ‘n’ Wild resort. The other made awkward conversation, which wasn’t helped along by the fact that he was clearly a man in his mid-to-late forties misrepresenting himself as an active 32-year-old. He had a grievance too: "Don’t mind," he said as we were saying our goodbyes, "but you’re not as fair as I thought you’d be. Somehow, you didn’t sound like a dark woman."

Two strikes, welcome to the real world.

But, and then again, but. Over the last three weeks, I allowed approximately 70 men and 40 women unlimited access to the mailboxes of Sayoni, Mayuri, Aditya and company. Out of them, there were about 15 men and 20 women (we’re clearly the better of the species, sorry) who sounded as though they might be right for me. To come up with that kind of field in the real world, I’d have to spend about six months on the party circuit, at clubs, networking through book launches or art gallery openings, hanging out at multiplexes or whatever. I would have to painfully work my way through a maze of inane conversation, big egos, mismatched family backgrounds and contradictory political beliefs in order to get to that shortlist. As a heterosexual woman out looking for a man, I’d also have to worry about whether the guy who seemed so nice at the party was actually a psychopath who had invited me back home so that I could be the Seventh Bride of Dracula.

If I had minority tastes, or a pet perversion, or a secret fetish, the task would have been that much harder-the Net, on the other hand, is built to accommodate minority groups. It might take me three years in the real world, with a lot of embarrassing encounters chucked in, to find a fellow human being who was turned on by, let’s say, earwax. On the Net, fellow users and abusers of earwax are perhaps just a click away. (To be honest, though, I must admit I’ve never checked for earwax user groups...)

Likewise, don’t knock the lack of intimacy till you’ve tried it. Not everyone has the same problems with cybersex that I did-I met at least four people who confessed that their real-world sex lives were suffering because they were spending so much time bonking virtually. People frequently cut through the crap in chatrooms and in their e-mails much faster than they would in real life. Private chatrooms, too, go a long way to setting up a facsimile of intimacy that can on occasion be even better than the real thing. As video and audio links improve, it’s going to be that much easier to get to know each other better online-if you’re willing to take the security risks. And who knows? The next millennium could bring in a way to "store" enough of your personality-or your various personae-online for someone else to simply upload Sayoni Sen or Aditya Kumar, million-dollar smile, halitosis and all. Virtual reality and cloning are already here: the worlds they open up are scary, but also very, very tempting.

There’s a whole lot more, but I have to go now. You see, I’ve got mail.

( Sayoni Sen is a virtual-world construct who’s having a whole lot more fun than her real-world creator. All the quotes in the story are real, though most handles and usernames have been changed on request.)