What has changed, though, is this: Gen Z women don’t want to date in their own communities—a homegrown brand of misogyny tends to kill the romance rather quickly. Take me, for example. I would never be with a man from Lucknow, my hometown, and I will spend my entire life warning other women against doing it. A Telugu friend, raised in Mumbai, confirmed my thesis. “There’s a sort of narcissism in North Indian men (her sample size is one man from Lucknow), which makes them emotionally constipated. They don’t dance, don’t cry, don’t express love, happiness,” she said. “It’s hard to be childlike around my North Indian man, I guess.” She needs to pick another state and try again.
Women in my gossip network can’t stop giving their hot takes on men, state-wise. Apparently, Odia men only like to eat and sleep and can’t be bothered to make date plans. Tamil men have a diverse palette when it comes to the food they can tolerate, unlike Delhi men. Kashmiri men are only good in theory; all the compliments about their looks have gotten to their heads. And men from Madhya Pradesh always marry their mother’s choice, so there is no point in dating them—so I have heard. Men say Delhi women are air-headed, Malayali women are too dominating, Rajasthani women are too orthodox and a lot of South Indian men think that all North Indian women are locked in the kitchen as soon as they are born. (Dear reader, I haven’t had the time to fact-check these claims, so believe at your own risk.)
A UP-born man has crossed the final hurdle—after five years together, he’s finally convinced his Karnataka-born girlfriend’s parents that he’s, in fact, good for her. His loud North Indian demeanour didn’t deter the girlfriend. The only cultural rift they encountered in their relationship was one of rice vs roti—the South Indian rice won in the end because, honestly, who has the time to make rotis every day?
In fact, food is a big battleground—everyone thinks their home state serves the best. A Bengali woman, who is dating a Malayali man, always makes it a point to mock her boyfriend about how his people eat dried fish—unlike her people, who only prefer fresh water fish. She’s suffering from maachoism. A Chandigarh boy, on the other hand, teases his Malayali girlfriend for how she can eat ripe jackfruit without making a face. “His understanding of good food is tandoori momo floating in Afghani sauce. It’s mortifying,” she told me.
Some healthy bickering is inevitable when people from two vastly different cultures cohabitate. A Delhi girl was called “Vadakkan” by her Tamil ex-boyfriend, which basically means northie (derogatory). She didn’t mind; she doesn’t quite identify as one anyway and it made the boy very happy to call her that.
Both sides, of course, are convinced the other is geographically challenged. I recently had a breakthrough with a Tamil boy who was ranting about how North Indians lump everyone together and can’t tell Kerala from Tamil Nadu. I asked, “What’s the capital of Uttar Pradesh?” You could hear crickets in the room. To him, all northies are Punjabis, anyway.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
