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Humour by Rehana Munir: Five kinds of WhatsApp groups
From the ones that sustain to the ones we disdain, it’s quite an array when it comes to the groups we’ve somehow gotten ourselves into
With the world outside shuttering down, we’ve been collectively sucked into our phone screens. Here’s a quick look at the five kinds of WhatsApp groups that dominate our chatscapes.
OGs
The master group whose chatter animates your life and fills up the empty spaces between your thoughts. From fashion to relationship advice, it’s the go-to gang whose endorsement you seek before even an innocent walk in the park. This group carries an outsized importance in your world, with interesting subplots providing drama within the larger group narrative. Between the effusive emojis over iffy haircuts and shared enthusiasm over in-jokes, there are plenty of passive-aggressive hmmmmms, knee-jerk walkouts and awkward re-entries that soon become fodder for still more in-jokes. It’s where all the high-powered decisions of life are discussed and debated using a friendship shorthand that is safer than any encryption.
Family
The group you love to hate, but need nonetheless, because it’s where so much material for the OG group originates. It’s the place where good taste and critical judgment go to retire prematurely. Between the 75th birthday video for an uncle you simply cannot remember, a tone-deaf meme about a woman on a diet, a spurious article about the many uses of camphor, a cautionary poster about the drawbacks of an investment scheme, an overheated and underinformed debate on politics and a quite excellent recipe for karela you will never try, you wonder what malevolent forces condemned you to imprisonment in this digital inferno. There is, of course, no escape, for should you leave, the ripples caused by your insolence will spread far and wide. Enough to impede your chances of a free stay with the distant cousin in Manhattan on the trip you’ve been deferring since 2019. Hang in there. The mute function is your best friend.
Colleagues
It’s scary how much work actually happens on this group. There’s more traffic on here than outside SRK’s home on a Sunday evening. The metronomic pings perform the function of a pacemaker for the collective office heart, still reeling from the work-from-home attack. From voice notes to PDFs, videos to Excel sheets, this little chat window makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered with all that fancy real estate to begin with. Yes, one misses the terrible coffee, if only because the spot near the vending machine offered a sideways glance of the charmer from marketing. And one can never get enough of those industrial photocopiers. And uninterrupted Wi-Fi. And… Ok, ok. Let’s not announce the death of the office just yet. To be exchanging messages with people sitting right next to you using work as an excuse is a modern pleasure not to be scoffed at.
Rebels
This is a bunch of renegades from any one of the groups listed above, making it a rebel OG, rebel family or rebel work group. The malcontents. The revolutionaries. The can’t-be-bothereds. They banded together as a reaction to the hegemony of the old order and now play by their own rules. They chat a lot about the parent group that brought them together while exhibiting the swagger a people freshly freed. It’s a sanctuary of screenshots from other groups, analysis of conversations left incomplete elsewhere and a space where radical new ideas emerge, like unknown home chefs and obscure TV dramas. After a while you forget what brought you together, and you just enjoy a group dynamic unburdened by ancient associations and their resultant anxieties. It’s imperative that the group stays secret, though. The powers that be are powerful indeed.
Trios
‘Two’s company; three’s a crowd’ goes the cliché, but my experience of WhatsApp groups attests to the opposite fact. The WhatsApp trio template offers the perfect window for interaction with a combination of friends and relations. It’s a group that relies heavily on chemistry, so its success depends on the right combination of members. But once it clicks, it sticks. Its three wheels allow for a freewheeling ride from the frivolous to the meaningful, with desirable doses of both intimacy and distance. An undemanding yet satisfying threesome, it’s a welcome escape from the sound and fury of all those other groups, rivalled only by a meandering private chat of rare lightness and ease.
Follow @rehana_munir on Twitter and Instagram
From HT Brunch, June 27, 2021
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