If you think this is an
intelligent piece of literary work (I can be immodest sometimes) that talks
about the latest WhatsApp acquisition, and the intricate financial analysis of
the same, then you are on the wrong page. It is about how people (girls mostly,
AND some guys) have been using (ABUSING) this powerful utility that was
ingeniously devised for helping people keep in touch. It is a story about how
I, a true believer of “e-social=anti-social”, fell into the trappings of this
vicious social media app and became a self-proclaimed ‘WhatsApp whore’ (a seemingly
sinister term that I invented purely for alliteration), and finally, after a
bout of severe self-‘rehabilitation’ got rid of the excruciating addiction and
became of my normal, skeptical, grumpy, self-obsessed self!
This goes back to the ancient
times when blackberries became the sudden rage thanks to BBM. Everyone in college
wanted one, and everyone who had one, wanted everyone else to buy one. I, true
to my unconventional self, bought an android (buying an android in that day and
age was unconventional, yes!) for the simple sake of my privacy. I hated the
notion of ‘chatting’ with people for hours using my fingers after chatting with
them for hours using my tongue (no sexual innuendos :P). Even when the disease
called WhatsApp had proliferated through the masses, I remained unaffected,
thanks to my no-mobile internet policy. But then, thanks to my employer, who
ensured a robust wi-fi, and my cheap cable wi-fi, I started WhatsApp. This was
also because people would never respond to my texts as they were using the FREE
WHATSAPP, and they could spend a lot for a cool phone, but not so little on
something as passé as a text message. (For some people, texting had become
tacky. SIGH).
Updating my facebook
profile/status was not enough anymore. I was in public domain on one more
platform, thanks to WhatsApp. Uninterested, I uploaded a ho-hum picture of
myself and a status that perpetually resonated
‘Sleeping’ as opposed to the immensely unenthusiastic ‘Hey there! I am
using WhatsApp’. The WhatsApp trend caught on, and some of my
non-english-speaking relatives also joined the brigade, with their not-so-photogenic
selfies and figured on my WhatsApp contacts. And buzz did my phone-until I
found the setting to shut off notifications.
Then came the new update- GROUPS! As if it wasn’t
enough to have one on one chat conversations, the WhatsApp fanatics now focused
on groupies (ahem ahem). I am a fairly amicable person, who had/has more than a few friends
and thanks to that I had more and more groups. I now have a group with a bunch
of friends from college, amongst which are some of my besties. The besties made
another group, eliminating the extras (didn’t know how to sugarcoat this). A
subset of that group was created by a friend of mine who is close to me and one
other guy that came to be known on my WhatsApp wall as “Awesome Threesome” (I
try not to bring any sexual overtones, but it just comes…urghhhh). My cousins
formed a group, which then germinated into another group which obviously had to
have a “bachelors only group”. Some long lost distant relatives, whom I didn’t even
know to exist, hijacked me into one of their groups that came to be called as
the “best cousins” group. When I politely excused myself from one of these
groups, I was and continue to be misconstrued as rude and an imbecile.
