【2025 Archives】

An Indian artist has been illustrating the real-life experiences of Tinder users in the country025 ArchivesInstagram and Facebook. Called the #100IndianTinderTales, the project crowdsources candid and intimate stories of love, desire and fleeting encounters.

Indu Harikumar, an illustrator and writer from Mumbai, began the '100 Indian Tinder Tales' project in April after trying out the app, first during a visit to Vienna, and then back home. She started with her own experiences and those of her friends, but the project grew into an attempt to "document urban desire without any sort of judgement" and to understand how other people navigated Tinder.

"I am interested in people's stories, what makes them tick, their fears, their aspirations, how they overcome things," Harikumar told Mashable. "I find everyday stories very inspirational, it helps me with my own fears and shortcomings."  

She focused on Tinder, because it was the only dating app she had used. "With distance, I look at it as a shopping app for people," Harikumar says. "So we are all creating stories about ourselves through pictures and bios."

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In just over a month, the project received an overwhelming response, leaving Harikumar surprised by the large number of people who opened up to her and talked about their personal experiences. 

"We don't talk about sex at all, so I am a bit taken aback by such honest accounts from absolute strangers," Harikumar, who has previously worked on a couple of crowdsourced projects on dreams and childhood memories, adds. 

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The stories themselves are honest and messy, a mixed bag of experiences ranging from from the comic to the poignant. A woman writes about using Tinder to find a salon in a new city, a man confesses to ditching his date because of bad breath, and a girl recounts how she lost her Tinder match to an accident. There are stories of people discovering a discrepancy between online and real-life personas, short-lived romances, as well as bad dates.

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All the illustrations are hand-drawn and drawn from an eclectic range of artistic references. Many of them inspired by Harikumar's favourite artists, such as Edward Munch, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Katsushika Hokusai, Roy Lichtenstein, Gustav Klimt, Raja Ravi Varma and Mario Miranda, which she adapts for the stories and with an Indian context. 

The stories behind the drawings also reveal how Indian women, who comprise a majority of Harikumar's sources, use Tinder to look for love and connections, confronting the societal taboos that still surround the use of a dating app in India.

"In a society that runs on the lines from a Ranjeet movie, 'The mare and woman need to be reined in tightly,' it is heartening to see many women assert themselves as sexual beings," she writes in a recent Facebook post, "taking control of their bodies and their minds, giving into desire and willing to share their stories, without shame or embarrassment."

"I think we are all looking to connect, and searching for some validation and love," Harikumar says. "Some may be seeking hook-ups or relationships through real or fake profiles, we may be lying or being honest, but the central theme is connection, whether for a night or a lifetime."

The #100IndianTinderTales project is still accepting submissions from Tinder users in India on Facebook.

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