WhatsApp groups are starting to mirror life

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I opened my extended family WhatsApp group, and sent some belated birthday wishes to the relatives with whom we had no property disputes. It’s the digital equivalent of touching the feet of elders. Your parents would sternly remind you on personal chat, to wish Bhopal-waalibua (aunt) on her birthday, lest she takes offence and brings up a 25-year-old incident to spite your mother.
Such groups are forever muted, hence I totally forgot about my message and opened the chat only after a week to check for replies. A lot of people had seen it, but there were four it was delivered to where it wasn’t read — all elders who are no more in this world now. Such truths find their unique ways of hitting you hard.
Essentially, every such WhatsApp group with the elderly is like a digital graveyard. Though ours is a Hindu family, members keep getting added to the delivered-but-not-read cemetery.
There is immense utility of such groups. It keeps our elders sane. The same elders who worked hard to give their kids the best education (and entrance exam coaching) so that the latter could move 10,000 miles away for their high-frequency trading jobs, leaving behind the elders in their 3-BHK Noida flat with fast Wi-Fi and a smartphone with WhatsApp enabled.
The family chatgroups give them the feeling of being in a joint family. A digital equivalent of peeling potatoes on a terrace with three other family members, subtly bitching about the (n-1)th generation. Just like the old days. Blissful.
Another “designated family” that uses this medium to the fullest is your workplace. The boss and the human resources department keep reminding you that it’s not a company but a family. That is, until there is a business restructuring exercise or Elon Musk takes over the company. Then, you have to return your laptop by 6pm sharp. There is no cemetery in such WhatsApp groups. You become ash.
This is the same group for which the delete-for-everyone feature was introduced. Imagine you take a screenshot of some stupid stuff your boss wrote, and instead of sending it to your colleague, you send it to the group itself, adding some flowery words from your mother tongue. The reason the details here are so specific is that the author here has been a victim. Not very glamorous to reveal “this is why I became an entrepreneur” on three-hour long podcasts. But here we are.
And when you become an entrepreneur, 50% of your work involves creating WhatsApp groups, introducing venture capitalists to founders, creating smaller teams to delegate work, and finding other partners to play pickleball.
In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies, a German sociologist, propounded the concept of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft — two types of human associations. Gemeinschaft deals with family, friends, and people you have a personal connection with. Gesellschaft is about people you are contractually obligated to interact with, like your boss and colleagues. It doesn’t encourage sending chat screenshots though.
Basically, Tönnies predicted the two types of WhatsApp groups you can be part of almost 140 years ago. But the one group that straddles both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is your building society Whatsapp group, a battleground between righteous 45+ Indian men and teenage stray-dog feeders.
The dogs themselves are blissfully unaware of such WhatsApp groups. Nevertheless, society WhatsApp groups are one of the greatest arguments against democracy. If you spend 30 minutes on it, you will vote for the next fascist leader who will get things done. And will also ban such groups which encourage such flagrant freedom of speech.
One other area of key interest for this cohort is how to squeeze the domestic help and delivery boys. “They should take the stairs. If you order a chips packet at 9am in the morning, it shouldn’t keep my lift busy when I go to work” will have 20 thumbs-up emojis. Sad day for 10-minute delivery.
It diagnoses the inherent split-personality disorder we all have. On one work group, your subordinate posts two paragraphs of a multi-city trade activation he executed with 47 adjoining photos, and you react with a thumbs-up emoji.
And in your college old boys group, you are critically appreciating the performance of a South Indian actress doing an item number in a Bollywood movie, while being proudly sexist and million other things you will get cancelled for. Often, when your spouse catches you smiling while chatting, it isn’t an illicit affair, it is your old boys WhatsApp group.
The work group has absolutely no clue about this facet of your personality. For them, you are still the stiff upper lip, the thumbs-up emoji boss. Until one fine day, they read on LinkedIn why you left that WhatsApp group.
Ultimately, modern life is punctuated by WhatsApp groups you were part of, the ones you joined, the ones you quit, the ones you were kicked out of, the ones you stopped responding to, the ones in which everybody left except you. It’s quite like life, with a built-in cemetery.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh.The views expressed are personal