Like most mobile users, I too am caught up in the WhatsApp web. Some friends and relatives have included me in their groups. The other day, an octogenarian relative posted, “I and my wife are unable to handle hundreds of posts on our smartphone. I am in no position to appreciate/reply/react to your posts. Please stop sending anything on WhatsApp to us.” Some consider it polite to react to posts. Some silently suffer and delete hundreds of posts after finding many of them useless for their age or temperament.
A relative got alarmed at a weather forecast about heavy rain and flooding posted on WhatsApp during the monsoon season and forwarded it to our group. I told him that the forecast was the previous year’s and somebody had reposted it mischievously or mistakenly.
My friend Raj is the administrator of a group consisting of his relatives. One day while forwarding a message from another group to his relatives, he failed to notice that he had shaded an extra post above the one he intended to transmit. Later, he realised that he had forwarded a vulgar post, from another group, to a group which included his wife, daughter and sister. He could not delete it at that time and had to apologise to his relatives for the inappropriate post. He promptly exited the ‘bachelors’ group.
On World Idli Day on March 30, many pictures of different idlis were posted in a group. A lady in the group wrote, “I am hosting an idli party for my schoolmates this week. There will be four types of idlis with two varieties of chutney and sambar with vadas. If all of you agree, we can all have another idli party in my house after the summer heat subsides.” There was a long silence. It was not addressed to anybody in particular; many detested an idli party.
Talking of silence, some members of groups are silent for most of the time except when somebody’s birthday is announced by one of the members and everyone starts posting birthday wishes. This sheep mentality has been carried too far that I find members of groups posting condolence messages in WhatsApp groups. Grief is a personal matter and one can send a condolence directly to a person so that he alone reads it, whereas in a group the entire group reads the message not addressed to them at all.
Email: mailpsubramanian@gmail.com