Right-Swiping Caste

Transcript

00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Love Virtually".

00:05 Ahead of Valentine's Day, Outlook's latest issue explores the many kinds of love,

00:10 from online dating for the youth and dating for the elderly,

00:14 to the otherworldly and unrequited love.

00:17 The issue also looks at how the concept of love has evolved

00:22 at a time when the divide between communities of different faiths is widened by politics.

00:28 Right Swiping Cast by Abhig Bhattacharya from Outlook

00:33 Dating apps mirror real life where the caste of a person

00:36 becomes a deciding factor in finding the right match.

00:40 Saloni, who is in her mid-twenties, could never imagine that the shadow of a caste identity

00:45 would follow her in the world of dating apps until she started dating a Tambram boy,

00:51 short form for Tamil Bramhin, whom she right swiped seeing his Vogue bio.

00:56 In his bio, the guy wrote everything progressive,

00:59 that he does not believe in caste, he is an atheist, politically moderate and so on, says Saloni.

01:06 But gradually, as she started dating him, she saw different shades of him.

01:11 "I belong to the OBC community. Whenever he got angry, he used casteist slurs to humiliate me," she adds.

01:18 They continued dating for almost a year, and by the time the facade of his Vogue-ness vanished,

01:24 Saloni managed to get rid of him.

01:26 While the caste discrimination that she faced on the dating app OKCupid is quite prevalent

01:32 and mirrors the everyday reality of society,

01:35 what is confounding is that most of the apps promise a caste classless experience.

01:41 Most of these apps, including the recent favourite Hinge,

01:45 leave the inclusion of surnames in the profile entirely to users.

01:50 The Help Centre of Hinge notes,

01:52 "If you create an account with Facebook, your last name will be added to your profile,

01:57 but it will only be visible when you match with someone,

02:00 not when someone views your profile in Discover."

02:03 While such efforts of not letting caste take over one's choice of right swiping

02:08 are considered a step in the right direction,

02:11 users feel that those who prioritise caste identity have ways to figure it out.

02:16 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.