Hello Writer #1 (Sushrut) here, farting back to life. I just do this for spiritual reasons. Enjoy this semi-rant I wrote a while back.
Fun Fact: if you drop a large bowl on your soooooo-2014 smartphone sans the gorilla glass the screen will crack. In my case the screen became unresponsive and the cost of repair was deemed too much. Anyway after contemplating about which phone would replace this one, I began to think about why I needed the phone anyway.[Don’t get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who think technology is a waste of time and distracts us from the truth and success and money and whatnot. Everybody has ways and means to effectively “waste” their time. The key is to enjoy whatever you’re doing causing no damage (or minimal damage) to your fellow humans.] Getting back to the topic, I concluded that the major reason I “needed” a phone was WhatsApp.
This amazing messenger app allows you to share racist/ sexist jokes instantly with your loved ones or bitch about your larger group of friends with your smaller group of friends. Basically stuff that was previously reserved for your family reunions or birthday parties is now accessible to you at the click of a button 24/7. There is an obvious danger of a burn-out, to the point where you can resent the sheer existence of a person due to their insistence on sharing pictures of cats. In my case, there is one big college group where the hard-working nerds would lovingly post all time tables and notifications with great tenacity and the too-cool-for-school humans would shower praise with heaps of emoticons and often swear words (eg I fucking luv u ;) :D ;) XD J :D ;* :D) Although the group was majorly useful for people who did not want get off their ass that day or any day viz-a-viz me, it was also often WRONGLY confused for a social hub to interact with people you have nothing in common with apart from a mutual want of killing time. All-in-all the time that you save checking time-tables or other details is ultimately wasted in 3000 message-volleys about nothing in particular.
Till this point, I could justify the use of WhatsApp. Then come the friends groups and family groups which I will avoid talking about due to risk of this turning into an academic paper. Moving onto the personal chats (referring to long conversations I have with people through this medium), it is important to mention who I am and how I interact with people. As a teenager living in a city who went to an English-medium school, I am most comfortable with English in terms of reading, writing and comprehension whereas conversation is much easier in my mother tongue (The irony is that I wouldn’t be able write this article in Marathi, my so called mother tongue).This means that conversation on WhatsApp is almost exclusively in English peppered with words from my mother tongue and real-life conversation is often the opposite. This is why I like to think of WhatsApp as the complete opposite of human social interaction. Personally, social interactions are something I like to avoid but WhatsApp offers a dangerously deceptive substitute. My conversations on WhatsApp can be summed up by “annoyed teenaged boy with issues that are the Indian substitute of white-boy problems uses dialogues he heard in Hollywood movies to charm or impress people he doesn’t even know properly”.
This brings me to my next point, what WhatsApp has done for me is given me templates of what to say on what occasion. So if want to express my feelings for a person, I just whip out an excerpt from a Hollywood rom-com (or its Bollywood “homage”) that I have literally grown-up watching and have by-heart. Or perhaps I am trying to sound bad-ass, just type out a line from ‘Fight Club’ and I’m golden. This happens subconsciously but has a huge impact of what I think of myself and what my peers think of me. What I’m trying to say is what I say on WhatsApp is very different from what I experience. That’s not to say that the influence of movies and the internet on me is negligible in any way but I do feel that WhatsApp segregates a large part of my being, my roots and creates a pseudo-personality of sorts. In hindsight, half the things I say on WhatsApp are just me para-phrasing movies and books which is not who I am in person. Call me crazy, but WhatsApp will ruin any relationship you have due to its large disparity with real life, if of course you rely on it too much.
Fun Fact: if you drop a large bowl on your soooooo-2014 smartphone sans the gorilla glass the screen will crack. In my case the screen became unresponsive and the cost of repair was deemed too much. Anyway after contemplating about which phone would replace this one, I began to think about why I needed the phone anyway.[Don’t get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who think technology is a waste of time and distracts us from the truth and success and money and whatnot. Everybody has ways and means to effectively “waste” their time. The key is to enjoy whatever you’re doing causing no damage (or minimal damage) to your fellow humans.] Getting back to the topic, I concluded that the major reason I “needed” a phone was WhatsApp.
This amazing messenger app allows you to share racist/ sexist jokes instantly with your loved ones or bitch about your larger group of friends with your smaller group of friends. Basically stuff that was previously reserved for your family reunions or birthday parties is now accessible to you at the click of a button 24/7. There is an obvious danger of a burn-out, to the point where you can resent the sheer existence of a person due to their insistence on sharing pictures of cats. In my case, there is one big college group where the hard-working nerds would lovingly post all time tables and notifications with great tenacity and the too-cool-for-school humans would shower praise with heaps of emoticons and often swear words (eg I fucking luv u ;) :D ;) XD J :D ;* :D) Although the group was majorly useful for people who did not want get off their ass that day or any day viz-a-viz me, it was also often WRONGLY confused for a social hub to interact with people you have nothing in common with apart from a mutual want of killing time. All-in-all the time that you save checking time-tables or other details is ultimately wasted in 3000 message-volleys about nothing in particular.
Till this point, I could justify the use of WhatsApp. Then come the friends groups and family groups which I will avoid talking about due to risk of this turning into an academic paper. Moving onto the personal chats (referring to long conversations I have with people through this medium), it is important to mention who I am and how I interact with people. As a teenager living in a city who went to an English-medium school, I am most comfortable with English in terms of reading, writing and comprehension whereas conversation is much easier in my mother tongue (The irony is that I wouldn’t be able write this article in Marathi, my so called mother tongue).This means that conversation on WhatsApp is almost exclusively in English peppered with words from my mother tongue and real-life conversation is often the opposite. This is why I like to think of WhatsApp as the complete opposite of human social interaction. Personally, social interactions are something I like to avoid but WhatsApp offers a dangerously deceptive substitute. My conversations on WhatsApp can be summed up by “annoyed teenaged boy with issues that are the Indian substitute of white-boy problems uses dialogues he heard in Hollywood movies to charm or impress people he doesn’t even know properly”.
This brings me to my next point, what WhatsApp has done for me is given me templates of what to say on what occasion. So if want to express my feelings for a person, I just whip out an excerpt from a Hollywood rom-com (or its Bollywood “homage”) that I have literally grown-up watching and have by-heart. Or perhaps I am trying to sound bad-ass, just type out a line from ‘Fight Club’ and I’m golden. This happens subconsciously but has a huge impact of what I think of myself and what my peers think of me. What I’m trying to say is what I say on WhatsApp is very different from what I experience. That’s not to say that the influence of movies and the internet on me is negligible in any way but I do feel that WhatsApp segregates a large part of my being, my roots and creates a pseudo-personality of sorts. In hindsight, half the things I say on WhatsApp are just me para-phrasing movies and books which is not who I am in person. Call me crazy, but WhatsApp will ruin any relationship you have due to its large disparity with real life, if of course you rely on it too much.
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