This column was born of exasperation.
I was on the verge of quitting my housing society’s WhatsApp group. The endless stream of “Good Morning” images, pixelated saints and recycled quotes had worn me down. I considered posting a blunt message, asking people to stop clogging the chat. My thumb hovered over the “send” arrow, with its heedless paper-plane icon.
What would be the point? It could only polarise and certainly wouldn’t help.
I considered leaving quietly. But I didn’t. That conflict, between irritation and belonging, is why I am writing this.
Every morning, the ritual repeats itself. A neighbour shares an image of a rising sun with a greeting in glittering fonts; another invokes a saint with a line from scripture; someone forwards a do-gooder quote; then a meme lands, a bad pun that still earns a handful of polite emojis. Almost inevitably, a “Breaking News update” arrives, breathlessly forwarded, though everyone has already seen it in the papers or scrolled past it half a dozen times.
The group wasn’t meant for this. It was created to keep us informed: of whether the lift was out of service, a plumber was expected, a new watchman was on duty or a water cut was imminent. Instead, it has become something of a daily genuflection to the meaningless platitude.
Standing there, annoyed and on the verge of quitting the group, I wondered: Why do people do this? What drives, in so many of us, the compulsive need to forward, comment, share?
Journalist Ravish Kumar popularised the phrase “WhatsApp University”, skewering how forwards masquerade as education and often fuel misinformation. This is the dark side of WhatsApp, but there is another side too. In The WhatsApp India Story (2024), authors Shalini Narayanan and Sunetra Sen Narayan show how the app is no longer just a tool but the connective tissue of India’s social life. There is other ethnographic literature on how neighbourhood groups have become “contact zones”, where belonging is negotiated through exactly the kind of chatter I was trying to silence.
Reading all this, my irritation softened into recognition. What I saw as clutter, others experienced as connection. The retiree forwarding a verse wasn’t “wasting my time”. He was trying to feel useful. The neighbour pushing out headlines wasn’t enlightening anyone. He was seeking companionship in a fast, unsettled world. Even the joker with his bad pun was really saying: Just stop and have a little laugh.
Beneath all the noise, on groups that don’t seek to do harm, lies something radical: people reaching out. In a world pulling apart, WhatsApp can be the village square: noisy, chaotic, but a vital common platform. A place where a vegetable vendor, school principal and CEO can laugh at the same joke, discuss the same traffic jam and argue over the same politician.
There is a reason WhatsApp has flourished in India. SMS was too expensive. Email too stiff and inaccessible. Facebook too public. WhatsApp was intimate and immediate, forgiving of fractured grammar. It has become the digital version of leaning over a neighbour’s wall for a chat, except that the wall now wends its way around billions.
For all its irritations, this inclusion matters. Anyone who has been dropped from a group knows the sting. Even the “Good Morning” I roll my eyes over is, in its way, a handshake across the void.
So tomorrow, when my phone buzzes with yet another round of pixelated suns and saintly quotes, I might sigh and grumble. But I will stay. Because behind every bit of banality is someone reaching out, saying: “I belong. And so do you.”
Maybe that’s not a bad thing to wake up to.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
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