Parmesh Shahani ruminates on tech-mediated love, sex and desire in today's society.
In the India I grew up in, love was an abstract idea, while sex and desire were two flowers coming together at the end of a Bollywood song. Then the 1990s happened, with Baywatch and Oprah Winfrey, Miss India swimsuit rounds and music videos. At least for a certain section of our society, and I reckon this includes many of us, dear Verve readers, satellite and cable TV expanded the boundaries of our erotic imaginations. Soon, the mobile phone gave us an address untethered from our families. It was a revolution. We began to play. It was a different world of SMS and missed calls that besotted us in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
When the internet happened there was another revolution — chat rooms, websites and what have you. I remember the first time I connected with someone in a gay chat room, it was absolutely thrilling. Some years later, smartphones came along. They were followed by the app ecosystem that surrounds us now. For digital immigrants such as myself, these have all been new worlds that we had to learn to navigate, but there is a young India out there, of digital natives, who are comfortably growing up in this virtual universe.
The question is, are all these technologies fundamentally altering how we imagine love, sex and desire? How are our online practices today — from friend requests on Facebook to the sexy selfies we send and receive on WhatsApp — shaping our search for human connections? These are questions that Vishnupriya Das, our Godrej India Culture Lab scholar-in-residence from the University of Michigan, has been trying to answer through her PhD on dating apps and sexuality in urban India.
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