I am old enough to remember a time when we had to suffer small inconveniences in silence without a forum to turn them into a dispute. (Image Source: Express Image/ Reuters)
A friend’s husband casually mentioned the other day that he was not on WhatsApp. I told him this was male privilege. It was a joke, but not entirely. If I left WhatsApp, several parts of my children’s lives would be in disarray almost immediately. Plans would be missed. School updates would vanish into thin air. Birthday invites, dress-up days, reminders to send something in a labelled ziplock bag by 8 am sharp, tuition teacher co-ordination — all gone. The little joy left in my life after all this is done, in the form of — what else — a WhatsApp group with my besties where we take down our enemies (always aligned on that), moan and whine about every insignificant problem, discuss our outfits at social events, and who is likely on Ozempic — also gone. My school friends and I, divided by continents but united on a WhatsApp group, would have no space to co-exist in that identity of the DPS class of 1998. Neighbours would remain anonymous. What presents itself as a messaging app has become the invisible infrastructure of community living.
This ubiquity is what makes WhatsApp difficult to think about clearly. To dismiss it as trivial or to blame it for everything is simplistic. In real life, it is a double-edged sword, both indispensable and corrosive. It has become the village square, the noticeboard in our buildings, the school diary, the complaint book, the emergency alert system, and a space where every minor irritation can suddenly acquire the moral seriousness of a public issue.
I am old enough to remember a time when we had to suffer small inconveniences in silence without a forum to turn them into a dispute. You grumbled to your spouse/sister/best friend, you raged privately, got a voodoo doll of the offending party, whatever. Then, you cooled down, and/or you forgot. Now every inconvenience arrives with a focus group waiting. A noisy neighbour or a car parked badly? Rage on the colony WhatsApp group. Your kid’s school bus is late, or you don’t like the teacher? Rage on the school WhatsApp group. We are humans, so we mess up, and should have the opportunity to move on and make amends without having the documented opinion of everyone in the WhatsApp community before we do that. Every small action in this very large world can be instantly narrated, circulated, and dissected. The very act of typing it out seems to enlarge it. Irritation hardens into grievance by virtue of being witnessed.
I don’t think it is because we have become worse people. Perhaps it is because the medium has altered the temperature of ordinary feeling. WhatsApp has collapsed the distance between annoyance and expression. It has removed the cooling-off period in which a sense of proportion once had a chance to intervene. The result is that trivial matters and personal feelings, once fleeting, now arrive before a jury and audience. They are no longer merely experienced; they are performed.
And performance, of course, changes behaviour.
We would not dream of speaking to our neighbours in person in the tone we casually use on WhatsApp. We would (I hope) not stand in our driveways and building lobbies in our dressing gowns and slippers and declare, with the same moral outrage, that someone has parked their car in the wrong place, that certain people needed to learn civic sense, that we are better than whoever is getting the job done. We would not issue little public notices about each other with quite the same relish. There is a phrase in Hindi, aankhon ki sharam. Face to face, the body intervenes. Shame does some useful work. We hear ourselves. We see the other person’s expression. We remember that co-existing peacefully in society depends on the proportion of response. On WhatsApp, all of that falls away. Hostility can dress itself up as administration. Rudeness can masquerade as clarity. And ChatGPT quickly refines arguments, grammar, etc., making our offensive behaviour effortless, so the gap between annoyance and action is even shorter.
And yet it would be one-dimensional to demonise WhatsApp. The WhatsApp group has also given an unparalleled platform to micro communities. Residents use it to raise issues no one would otherwise address, and warn one another of real problems. Mothers exchange information, send doctors’ numbers, recommend tutors, and find lost bags. Extended families remain in touch. Countless small businesses across the country run on WhatsApp.
The very same platform that magnifies a particular breed of pettiness also enables fellowship. The same group that left you feeling judged and persecuted at 8.05 am can rescue you at 8.10.
In addition to the multiple personalities we all carry, we develop a specific one for WhatsApp. A is the one who always knows; B the one who always reminds. C is the peacemaker, smoothing over friction. And of course, there are the watchers, always reading, never commenting. There is support here, undeniably, but also pressure — pressure to remain responsive, to stay informed, to have a wisecrack ready, and so on.
What is striking is how few people are really free to opt out. The man who is “not on WhatsApp” is treated as charmingly old-school and above the nonsense. A mother who goes down the same road will very likely be judged irresponsible and aloof. Her absence would not be construed as independence; it would instead be called negligence. She would not be leaving a platform; she would be opting out of the administrative bloodstream of contemporary family life. WhatsApp hasn’t just changed brick-and-mortar communication; it has altered expectations. We are now expected to be available, informed, and willing to respond to each other’s inconveniences in real time. Silence is neglect, and delay is rudeness — private irritation is so two decades ago. We now expect our annoyance to actively matter to others. The group chat doesn’t just connect us; it gives a forum to circulate thoughts that wouldn’t earlier have warranted mass attention.
The question is not whether we should all leave, because that’s not really an option anymore. The question is whether we can recover any sense of scale inside the groups themselves. Whether support can remain support without sliding down the slippery slope of pressure, performance, and moral theatre. Or, as a neighbourhood elder in my colony WhatsApp group implored, “Good Morning, be Lavish to appreciate, Be a Miser to criticize.”
