WhatsApp Wars!

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.

There is more to write…so much more to rant about! How about some other time? Meanwhile, let me quickly check my WhatsApp. I have 21 unread messaged from 3 contacts. :P

Thesis on Friendly Behavior and Creatures Termed as “FRIENDS”

Man, famously known as the social-animal (despite his many anti-social elements), loves to be surrounded by a throng of people, whom he more often than not mistakenly calls his Friends. We study in this thesis the purpose and peculiarities of these creatures, their importance in one’s personal life, their detrimental effect on one’s health (smoker befriends smoker paradigm) and the mother of all questions- who are friends after all?

Oxford Dictionary has a foul, defecation-like definition of friend-“a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relation” . First of all, it’s too concise. I mean I know they had to fit in all-so-many words in one little book, but elaborating a little more wouldn’t have killed them. Moreover, I think the definition is out-dated. Mutual Affection-honestly, seems like the writers of the lexicon, were short of words. Plus, the sexual part isn’t completely true-Friends with Benefits-ring a bell to you? (this part is strictly not based on my personal life or my affiliation with my friends. It has purely been platonic.)

(Enough about the dictionary definition! Back to the theory now! The writer has a bad habit of digressing.)

Postulate 1: Total number of friends in one’s life is a fixed constant. (Partial credit to a certain friend for helping me come up with this one!)

The “capacity of friendliness” is like the power of adsorption of a substance, purely based on the composition of subject-in the former case, it’s the person’s true, innate nature. So, if you are trying to befriend more people than you can actually handle, you will realize the true paradoxical nature of this thesis- you will feel all the more alone. Lonely, to be precise!

Postulate 2: Number of Facebook friends is inversely proportional to your friends in real life

(People who have more than a 1000 Facebook friends, please dismiss the writer as a maniac and navigate back to Facebook)

The reason why you got so many friends on “The Social Network” in the first place is that you have spent a big chunk of your life liking and tagging people and pleasing them with the saccharine and sugar-sweet life. What about the bad part? Facebook doesn’t have a Dislike button. You know why? Because then people would stop going there.

Postulate 3: A Friend to All is a Friend to None

Everybody’s friend can be your friend, but never the best one. He/She will be discreet about things until you will learn about them on twitter/ Facebook or through India TV (If you are that happening and have famous friends). Litmus test to identify such friends- ask them a question about taking a stance about someone, if they fail, then they belong to this category.

Postulate 4: You can have ONLY ONE Best Friend

This is the truest of the postulates. You might have a lot of close friends and choosing one of out of the lot, might seem like a challenge (being true in the writer’s case), but there’s always one friend who’s true to you, at least truer than the rest. It may happen that one is the best out of the lot for a time-span, then there’s someone else. So if you have the time, keep a list every month. (You are a LOSER if you actually do this!)

(Enough with the thesis! Friends are Friends, with whom you can kick-back, relax, and sip a beer (sherbet in some cases, where people are from small towns, like in the case of the writer)! Families are your inheritance- you may like your aunt’s husband or may completely detest your paternal aunt, but you have to put up with them. With friends-they are the family you choose. So do as they say in any Telebrands commercial-“Choose wisely, live well”)

Below song dedicated to ONLY those friends with whom I have laughed my heart out!

PS- +1 it on google icon if you like it, or share on FB J