Pranav Singh, 28, wasn’t with it. The Delhi banker thought he was “un-cool” and “Internet challenged”. On the hunt for dates — “not a wife” — he was wary about meeting women from his circle of friends. Months passed. Nothing happened. “I needed action. I wanted to meet new people with no strings attached. And I didn’t want to go through friends as matters get complicated when a relationship doesn’t work out.”

So last year he took an alternative route.

The yawn-inducing profile on Orkut got revamped. The “nice boy” photo on Facebook made way for one which had two girls giggling on either side. The “About Me” space on fropper.com switched from “hard working” to “Please don’t get your mom/sis on our first date … Hmm … Actually, I wouldn’t mind your sis!” The unanswered “Do you like pets?” question on dating.indya.com was met with “Chicken. I love pets that can be eaten.” The “favourite sport” question on ibibo.com was colourfully put as “synchronised swimming and women’s tennis — the girls are really good at sports, aren’t they?” And when asked what he thought was a perfect date on datingfunda.com, he replied: “When the girl pays for the date … and the parking!!” With that, Pranav had climbed the online dating bandwagon.

Forget matrimonial sites — forget friends’ circles, peer groups, malls, Baristas, TGIFs and good old college pals. And forget that smoking-hot neighbour’s neighbour whom you eyed at the local Mother Dairy. A good bet to find your next date may not be in any of these places but in cyberspace, and on an Indian dating site.

Pure dating sites such as indiadating.com and dating.indiatimes.com are a platform for those who want to go out with people they connect with on the net. The Indian social networking site, fropper.com, is the hip-’’-happening go-to place for a date. And of course, the global websites — Orkut, Facebook and so on — are always there. Most of these sites don’t charge for their services, and some seek to stress that they are not dating sites but are meant for social networking.

Rediff.com has taken a slightly different path with its “flirt” application where you log in to send a text message. There is talk that Yahoo!’s “Yahoo! Personals’ application” — a rage in the West — might take off in India soon. “But we can’t say when,” says a senior Yahoo! executive.

Cyber dating, clearly, has taken off in India, as the number of users logging into such sites indicates. Fropper.com, which began in 2003 and transformed into a full-fledged social networking platform a couple of years ago, currently has 3.5 million users in the country. Indiatimes.com’s dating site has around 1.2 million users. Dating.indya.com clocks around 300 hits a day and has roughly 74,000 users.

The newest site hot on the friendship/dating/relationship radar, though, is ibibo.com which went online in early 2007 and already has a subscriber base of around 1.5 million users.

Someone interested in online hooking up needs to put up a picture, along with a profile, on one such site. If somebody else finds the profile attractive enough, he or she gets in touch with the site, which in turn sends the person an email “buzz.” The sites are for fun and casual dating, unlike the matrimonial sites where the bottom line is a long-term relationship.

For many, online dating is fun. “Knowing a person beforehand does have disadvantages. He or she may know something about you already. The fresh vibe is difficult to create then,” says Haroon Tavawala, 29, an executive in Mumbai and a “serial dater”. “And they don’t need to be rank strangers. A friend’s friend whom you don’t know — but have seen online — is interesting. You’re not someone whom she cannot place and you have some level of comfort,” says Tavawala, who happily spends time scouring the “friend lists” of his friends on such sites in search of a potential date.

Life is not always this rosy. For Radhika Kumar, a masters degree student in Delhi University, online dating hasn’t been a great experience. “I was new to it. I met this guy who seemed absolutely decent online. We got talking on the phone and he began making some obscene comments. I cut it right there,” she says. Radhika’s friend Payal, a svelte 30-something, has gone to the extent of blocking off her Orkut profile because of getting unsavoury messages. “I kept getting messages that said ‘Can I make fraandship with you?’ in broken English from men I didn’t know,” she says. “There was also a colleague who hit on me online, and I blocked it.”

Online decency and obscenity are key issues. Most social networking and dating sites now have strong vetting mechanisms in place. But the trick to landing a safe, decent date lies in some “home work”, says Pranav Singh. “You have to get talking for some time. Once the trust is established we can exchange phone numbers. I never share my number till I decide that I want to meet someone. I don’t go to the lesser known sites. They are rubbish,” he says. Seconding that is Payal, who has now limited her networking and casual dating solely via Facebook.

Not everybody believes in the advantages of dating through the net. “The net has formed a new set of social relationships and a new type of behaviour. Friends talk and meet more often online than in person. You might as well marry online,” wisecracks Anand Kumar, a sociology professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “It’s a reflection of how isolated urban Indians have become. And online dating is the young generation’s idea of fun and finding an ally,” he says.

For the moment though, no one’s complaining. Singh’s hands are full. He has three dates lined up for the week. Tavawala is considering asking out a woman he met on an ibibo.com community link on skiing. Radhika and Payal have found a double date through a fropper.com discussion board on fashion. “The fun has just begun,” chuckles Singh.