If our lives are stories, and our loves are lies, then our research must look at the tales, how they are built and who narrates them. Dhiren presented a weave of stories collated through my work with queer and non-dominant communities to highlight how in the context of LGBT folks in India, spaces are increasingly neither exclusively online nor offline, but are hybrid. Dhiren tried to explore queer possibilities in our desires and the queering of our cities within their ephemeral nature, in terms of safety, freedom and anonymity.
In this process, he looked at queerness as aspirational amid caste and class anxieties. In how technology mediates our ‘many’ desires, we look at the play of caste and class in our maps of Grindr, an online smart-phone based dating app, through the city of Delhi. To ask, both in terms of spaces that are produced, and geographies of time — when do desires of certain kinds seem feasible, and for whom?