The cellphone operator's messages to get you chatting with young women turns out to be a damp squib. We didn't get to speak to an interested woman or any woman for that matter

If Airtel's been holding out the promise of new friends interested in chatting with you, don't bother trying: We did and realised that nobody's even remotely interested.

Worse, the numbers sometimes take you to complete strangers who have no clue as to what's happening.
For instance, we received a text message from Airtel saying Prachi, a 19-year-old female, was interested in chatting with us. We were given a number and told it would cost Rs 2 per minute to chat with Prachi. We called. And called. And called...

Most times, the line kept getting cut. Then we got lucky. "We are connecting you to your female friend," a voice finally said. But the "female friend" was either "busy" or "disconnected from the system".

Airtel then tried to connect us to "another friend with similar interests".

Rude man

But it turned out to be a man obviously not very interested in chatting up a stranger. We explained to him that we were looking for a friend to talk to and that Airtel had provided us with the number. The man hung up even before we could finish our sentence.

MiD DAY had no more luck trying to contact Supriya, Aditi, Nisha, Supreet and Rupali, all young women between 17 and 21 years, whose names had been provided to us by Airtel. The line either got disconnected or we were connected to perfect strangers who quickly hung up, annoyed at having been bothered by other strangers.

Just can't be, says Airtel
According to Airtel's spokespeople, invitations to chat are only sent to customers who subscribe to the chat service.

When MiD DAY explained that we received messages without subscribing, Airtel admitted that invitations to chat can be sent to general customers as "promotion messages".

But Airtel couldn't explain how we managed to call the numbers we received that were not registered to the chat service. "You are supposed to be asked to subscribe to the service for Rs 30 before you can speak to anyone," a spokesperson said.