My Friend's Experiments with Whatsapp

Vinod had newly come to the city in search of a job. He had Rs. 1364/- with him that time and did not know how to make a call from a mobile phone. Today after 10 years, Vinod has a job giving him a salary of Rs. 35000/- a month and he owns his third mobile handset.

Vinod is a happy man nowadays as his third handset is a smart-phone. He has downloaded practically every mobile app in his phone, has configured all seven of his email ids which includes his official email id as well and he proudly sends replies to his official mails from his handset. When he first saw auto generated signature below his mail id stating ‘sent from xxx smart phone from yyy operator’ after sending a mail from his smart phone for the first time, his happiness knew no bounds. He became proud to be born to his parents and remembered the entire struggle he made from childhood up to reaching that stage in a flash of moment. Even now, whenever he sends a mail from his mobile and sees his signature below the mail, his chest fills with pride.

Along with other apps he downloaded, one was Whatsapp. He was all in bliss to connect with his family members and acquaintances on whatsapp after a long time. Soon, he became addicted to using it and had to control himself from its rampant use during office hours.

Vinod, the philosopher, has a view that groups of whatsapp users is the most revolutionary invention of this century. He still remembers the day on which he became member of the first group. Suddenly an icon appeared on his whatsapp screen and he started receiving posts from various group members. He liked this idea very much and started becoming member of more and more groups. He has a sincere feeling that group admin is a very coveted status and more precious that chairman of a company. After he also became Admin of a few groups, he changed his whatsapp status to “When I came to this city, I didn’t even have a mobile phone, but today I am member of 15 whatsapp groups of which, admin of 7 groups. See the achievement.” When we pulled him for such a ridiculous status, he changed it back to the original one.

We had a common whatsapp group of our departmental people and Vinod was one of its members. Once, Vinod posted a rather vulgar joke in our group. I called him and fired over the phone asking him not to post such jokes as the group was of office colleagues. Fortunately, there was no female member in our group to feel offended. Vinod’s reply was, “what are you saying boss, this was posted by a female in another group of which I am a member.”

Whenever Vinod used to get nervous previously, he used to close his eyes for two minutes and open them again. Now, he starts looking at his handset. I asked him, “What do you see in your handset? Does it really change your mood?” “What to tell you boss, whatsapp has the whole philosophy of life” he replied. “How come?” “See, whenever I feel dejected, I go through DP and whatsapp statuses of all my contacts. Not only is it the greatest source of free entertainment, but these statuses give you philosophy of life. Each whatsapp status is the living philosophy. You can choose and pick whichever you like. Your mood gets fresh in no time.” "Such a strange person you are! Why do you poke into others' personal things?" I asked. "Boss, nothing is personal in whatsapp statuses. They are meant to be read by strangers. Whatsapp statuses are like decorated goods presented for sale on stalls. They tell you how nice the person wants others to feel about him but not how actually he or she is." 

Vinod continued unstoppably, "not just that, you also get to know the latest news by reading others' whatsapp statuses. Once on seeing photo of a small baby as DP and status of one of my old friends, I I came to know that he became father of a baby boy." I laughed at this, but it also made me conscious that my details are easily available to others on whatsapp. 

When it comes to keeping philosophical statuses, Vinod was happy to read them, but once someone from his contacts started bothering him with too many and frequent philosophical posts. I asked Vinod to block that person on whatsapp, but he didn’t want to do that as that person had helped Vinod a few years ago. After that we didn’t hear from him about the person sending him posts. A few days later, Vinod informed me that the person had stopped sending him philosophical posts. I asked him what he had done to stop his posts. He replied, smiling and blinking his eyes, “I sent him two - three vulgar jokes on whatsapp to make him realize that I don’t appreciate his posts. Then he stopped sending me his philosophy.” He did not forget to add that basically he is a decent person but had to take this diversion to avoid the philosophical overdose.

We all use whatsapp regularly but its charm seems to have faded compared to its initial days. Now, almost everyone has a smart-phone (I am talking about metro cities of India) and can access whatsapp. While this gives an advantage of connecting with our dear ones free of cost, it has a flip side of people wasting their productive time in creating, reading and forwarding worthless messages to others, thereby wasting others’ time as well. Another observation is that most of the cautionary messages doing rounds on whatsapp turn out to be rumours, which also pose a question about reliability of its use.

But Vinod never lost his keen interest in whatsapp. His love for it has become more and more intense. Perhaps he is yet to reach that peak where one starts losing interest in the new thing. Whenever we start the topic on disadvantages of using whatsapp, he gets wild and starts defending it aggressively, as if he were the founder of whatsapp.

Vinod has a habit of experimenting new things. Once he created a new whatsapp group that included his wife, some other relatives and strangely, some of the office colleagues as well. For a few days, everything went off well; but once, Vinod accidentally added his boss to the group. The boss took this opportunity and started trolling Vinod on the group. He started reminding Vinod about the work pending in office and asked for status of pending assignments on the whatsapp group. Once he openly fired him in the group for not completing an important work and posted that he kept on accessing whatsapp in office hours instead of working. This made his position thoroughly awkward and he had no option but to dissolve the group. Since then, though Vinod’s love for whatsapp has not reduced an ounce, his wife keeps a close watch on his whatsapp activities.