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