To be or not to be on WhatsApp

At the outset, let me briefly reopen some wounds, albeit purely for academic purposes. I hope you understand and let me examine whether my real-world sufferings have merely persisted or matured, like a well-bred tragedy, into something richer, darker, and faintly operatic. If pain were a stock, mine would have outperformed the Sensex in a nosedive match.

One recurring affliction may be clinically described as WhatsApp tyranny. As a long-suffering inmate of this digital asylum, I have often declared open war through my blogs on its weaponised ‘kindness’, that peculiar strain of benevolence where every ping arrives dressed as a moral ambush, perfumed with glittery GIFs of neon-orange deities or aggressive sunflowers. Invoking Hamlet’s 'cruel to be kind' paradox, I had argued that these people are so aggressively kind they border on the sadistic. From obscure festivals nobody had asked for to 3:15 AM ‘Good Morning’ ballistic missiles, the deluge is nothing short of biblical. They don't just wish you well unsolicited; they seem to demand a receipt for their holiness. Quotes, parables, and emotional blackmail fly thicker than Diwali sweets at a Marwari wedding. Guided by Mirza Ghālib, I had renounced this suffocating benevolence, switched off notifications, and embraced wine, sarcasm, and dignified silence, because nothing says self-care quite like ghosting 493 blessings in one majestic sweep.

And just when you imagine the circus cannot sink lower, in marches the ‘RIP’ brigade, proof that WhatsApp can industrialise even grief. Condolences now arrive like factory output: some dispatch essay-length sorrow plagiarised from ‘Deepest Condolences for All Occasions,’ while others lob a casual ‘RIP’ and promptly return to reels and recipes. Grief is now a group activity where authenticity is entirely absent, theology is mauled, and emotion is subcontracted. If kindness was cruel, this is digital necrophilia armed with Wi-Fi. We have 'RIP' flung casually with the same emotional weight one gives to a swig of soda, bestowed upon the dead, misdelivered to the living, and read by everyone except those who matter. It is grief as a drive-thru service: participation compulsory, sincerity outsourced to a template, and the deceased squeezed unceremoniously between a discounted air-fryer ad and a video of a golden retriever playing the piano.

What, pray tell, is so singular about a birthday? Every breathing creature has one; it is a feat of biology, not character. Let us be honest: I don't merely dislike being wished; I positively loathe the ritual. But these social media birthday wishes are a special category of torture, dripping with the kind of all-pervasive natural stupidity that only a high-speed internet connection can facilitate. This annual torrent of manufactured affection serves only as a digital countdown clock, a relentless reminder that I am another year closer to kicking the bucket. It makes the entire business of existing feel quite lousy, as if I am being cheered on toward the exit by a crowd of people who can’t even be bothered to type the full wish and their blasted fingers move on, punching ‘HBD’.

A theatre of recurring humiliation has been my distinguished career as a ‘garlanded but insulted casualty’, a veteran of that glittering circus where honours are bestowed with one hand and dignity quietly pickpocketed with the other. With William Shakespeare and Mirza Ghālib as my co-conspirators, I had chronicled a tragicomedy of rogue recognitions: sharing podiums with scamsters, being eclipsed by perpetually arriving ministers, morphing into bald impostors in print, and standing 113th in a queue long enough to qualify as a pilgrimage. Each felicitation arrives gift-wrapped in embarrassment, botched logistics, dubious company, and vanishing self-respect. The lesson? In the grand theatre of recognition, applause is optional, humiliation complimentary, and dignity safest when chauffeur-driven by oneself, because the 'official' car for the drop-off is invariably a phantom, or worse, a shared rusting Maruti 800 that arrives two hours late, driven by a man who has never heard of your destination or, indeed, of your existence.

Now, in this blog, I turn to how the universe, never one to do things by halves, conspires to gleefully double down and apply an exponential turbocharger to my misery by combining WhatsApp ‘kindness’ with direct WhatsApp insult. The result is a perfect storm: benevolence in public, brickbats in private. What follows, therefore, is a curated catalogue of fresh calamities, each lovingly footnoted by the Bard and the Chachā. But with a difference this time, as they engage with me, their nephew, as well.

Random stranger sending overcrowded train images and moral lectures: This happens now and then when some gentleman I do not know from Adam forwards me, with prosecutorial zeal, images of rail passengers marinated like sardines in a general coach, overflowing into the toilets for good measure, and then demands, as if serving a summons, that I hang my head in shame for daring to develop the ‘luxurious’ Vande Bharat Express while the nation is apparently commuting in cattle class with plumbing.

Shakespeare: Do not worry, my friend Mani. Flipping Antonio’s words in The Tempest: “...what’s past is prologue, what to come not in your discharge...” Besides, in line with what Puck told Oberon while watching a particularly frantic group-chat in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, do remember, “Lord, what fools these Indians be!”

Ghālib: Why single out the Indians, biased babu Shakaspīr-e-Āzam (Mr. King Shakespeare)? We are a universal circus! 

Bas-ki dushvār hai har kaam kā āsāñ honā

Aadmī ko bhī mayassar nahīñ insāñ honā

(dushvār: difficult, hard, arduous, āsāñ: simple, mayassar: available. It is so difficult for anything to be easy; the monkey in the mirror rarely becomes the man, and the man rarely becomes human.)

Old acquaintances turning into WhatsApp warriors and attacking you: We have people known to me and friendly for decades, or friends lost for decades but united in a WhatsApp group, actually insulting and badmouthing me for my views on politics, Indian Railways, religion, music, arts, food, aunts, nieces or anything else under the sun.

Ghālib: I have regularly encountered such morons in life, so worry not Mani biraadar (brother), you should feel vindicated.

Yaarab! vo na samjhe haiñ na samjheñge merī baat

de aur dil un ko jo na de mujh ko zabāñ aur

(O Lord! They have not understood, nor will they ever understand my words; give them more heart, if You will not give me a different tongue.)

Shakespeare: Yes, Master Galibary, think of Beatrice speaking to the Messenger in Much Ado About Nothing regarding Benedick, her intellectual rival and his yet-to-be lover, suggesting sarcastically that his only valour is at the dinner table rather than on the battlefield: “You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it. He is a very valiant trencherman. He hath an excellent stomach.” So, why bother about these WhatsApp warriors who are otherwise men of straw?

Being thrown out of a school WhatsApp group for a harmless joke: I was recently ousted from a prudish school WhatsApp group for committing the twin felonies of a harmless irreverent jibe and a joke that merely tiptoed, with great decorum, toward the outskirts of vulgarity. Nothing more scandalous than a raised eyebrow in polite society, but apparently enough to trigger a full moral evacuation.

Shakespeare: Aha! Enjoy the situation, dear Esem. Think of Romeo speaking to Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, upon hearing of his exile. It is at once funny and melodramatic, as being kicked out of a school chat can be treated like being banished from the world: "There is no world without Verona walls But purgatory, torture, hell itself. Hence “banished” is banished from the world...” In any case, as Rosaline wisely tells the boasting Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “…A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it…” If the school group lacks the ear for your wit, the joke was simply too prosperous for its audience.

Ghālib: Nevertheless, zahīn alfāz ke sipahsālār (commander of clever words), if they can't handle my language and wit, I'll happily build my own house without doors so such moronic neighbors have no access to me.

Rahiye ab aisī jagah chal kar jahāñ koī na ho

ham-suḳhan koī na ho aur ham-zabāñ koī na ho

(ham-suḳhan: conversing or talking together. Now let us go to a place where no one else is near, no one to share my speech, no one with an ear to hear.)

Post deleted selectively in the professional group of Lucknow railway mechanical engineers: One of the administrators, and the group has a positively a positively imperial glut of administrators, of this group called IRSME@LKO, conferred upon me the rare and glittering honour of selective censorship by deleting only my post, while serial offenders and full-time nuisances continued to roam free like protected wildlife. Recognising such bespoke discrimination for the distinction it was, I accepted the award with due humility and promptly vamoosed from the group before they could elevate me further to permanent exhibit.

Ghālib: Let me cover the irony here, dada (playfully, granddad) Sudhanshu,

PakḌe jaate haiñ farishtoñ ke likhe par nā-haq

aadmī koī hamārā dam-e-tahrīr bhī thā

(farishtoñ: angels, dam-e-tahrīr: at the time of writing my fate. I am caught based on the scribbles of angels (admins) quite unfairly; was there any man sympathetic to me present when the record was being written?”

Shakespeare: But dear Asad Lionham, after all, ‘some are silenced by authority, others by absurdity,’ but better be silenced by absurdity. In Measure for Measure, I covered the hypocrisy and the pomposity of officials misusing their authority, through Isabella, as she pleads with Angelo, the Deputy of Vienna, to spare the life of her brother Claudio, who is sentenced to death for a crime Angelo himself will soon attempt to commit: “...but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority… Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.”

No Entry in a private alumni group: In a similar group of fellow professionals and their spouses from my railway alma mater, once serenely housed in quaint Jamalpur, now long extinct but apparently reincarnated as a WhatsApp republic, I am not even granted a visa, along with a couple of fellow, and evidently more celebrated, mavericks. The administrators can, of course, hide behind the iron curtain of it being a private group, that last asylum of selective hospitality. One is tempted to feel oddly honoured. I must have committed some act of such spectacular originality that it merited this rare distinction. After all, I may occasionally fire a loose cannon, but I have yet to demolish the entire harbour like a certified bull in a china shop.

Shakespeare: Hey, brother Mani Es Esquire, you perhaps belong to a different species of intellect entirely. I trust you have read Timon of Athens. Timon, deprived of his fortune and betrayed by his circle, expresses total misanthropy when he tells Alcibiades that he hates all mankind, wishing they were dogs so he could tolerate them: “I am misanthropos, and hate mankind. For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might love thee something.”

Ghālib: Thanks for the last word, Ustād Shakaspīr (Master Shakespeare), I have a lot to tell this hapless Mani. If your wine and glass, which arguably is your wit, is too much for the pious group, let it be their problem, not yours.

Har chand ho mushāhidā-e-haq kī guftugū

Bantī nahīñ hai bāda-o-sāġhar kahe baġhair

(Har-chand: although, howsoever, mushāhida-e-haq: witnessing truth, bāda-o-sāġhar: wine and glass. Even if the conversation is about the ultimate truth, doubtful though it is, It would remain incomplete without the wine and the glass.)

There is uniqueness in being excluded which you must rue, mock and celebrate at the same time. Ask those who would not understand, whether the SAM group is so fragile that your presence will make it crumble:

Ghālib-e-ḳhasta ke baġhair kaun se kaam band haiñ

roiye zaar zaar kyā kījiye haa.e haa.e kyuuñ

(Ghālib-e-ḳhasta: fragile, debilitated Ghālib, zaar zaar: intense, bitter as an adjective for lamentation.  Without the wretched Ghālib, what work has come to a halt? Why weep so bitterly? Why raise such a hue and cry?)

Fake id with my photo: The latest calamity takes the cake, the bakery, and the entire catering contract. Some entrepreneurial genius created a fake ID in my name and began cold-calling my friends, both inherited and freshly acquired, peddling what appears to be highly imaginary real estate. Fortunately, my friends possess one crucial piece of intelligence: I have never successfully sold anything in my life, not even an idea without footnotes. The impostor was therefore unmasked faster than a bad actor in a school play, and, thanks to the Cyber Crime police, the fraudulent avatar has since been escorted out of existence.

Ghālib: But why you? What can they gain from a lafandar (vagabond) like you, Montu Mani? So, you have a right to shout:

Ham kahāñ ke daanā the kis hunar meñ yaktā the
be-sabab huā Ghālib dushman āsmāñ apnā

(daanā: knowledgeable, yaktā: skillful. I was neither knowledgeable nor was I peerless in any skill; for no reason at all, heavens have become my enemy.)

Shakespeare: Dear Master Gully-of-Grief, it is the ultimate comedy of errors! To steal the identity of this Mani, a man who boasts no acumen for profit, is like trying to forge a check on a bank that does not even exist. For this digital impostor, I would suggest the words of my ubiquitous ancient rogue Pistol.  As he decares in Henry V, “Base is the slave that pays “ and as he threatens in  the rare Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor, “I will retort the sum in equipage.” If this thief insists on playing at being you, they must also inherit your ‘equipage’, a haul consisting entirely of WhatsApp vitriol, musty victuals, and the recurring misery of being garlanded but insulted. They picked the wrong skin for a profit! It is a delicious irony that after a lifetime of dodging the law, the police have finally validated Mani’s existence by rescuing it. Even if your old friends have barred the gates, the State clearly considers you far too valuable to be stolen. You are now a protected asset of the Cyber Cell!

The list is endless. You may well ask why I remain on WhatsApp at all. The answer is simple: it is undeniably useful, and I am not yet prepared to renounce the world. My grievance, rather, is that these WhatsApp morons persist, presenting me with a dilemma, or more precisely, a Hobson’s choice: to be or not to be on WhatsApp. And this Hobson fellow appears to be winning. I stay on. After all, Mirza Ghālib might well stoop to hyper-correct one of Zauq’s shers thus:

Behtar hai yahī ki na WhatsApp se dil lage

Par kyā kareñ jo kaam na be-dil-lagī chale

(be-dil-lagī: without attachment of heart. Better not to let your heart get entangled with WhatsApp; but what to do, when life’s work refuses to proceed without this attachment?)

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