WHATSAPP WARRIORS

 

WhatsApp Warriors’ is the term I have coined for my friends who wage their own war on all and sundry utilising their most deadly weapon, the smart phone. This war is non violent in the kinetic domain but in the vitriolic one, it is deadly. The only difference being it is in the virtual world, the old adage which went something like this, ‘if looks could kill’, here this has been replaced by ‘if posts could kill’, ‘we would have a genocide’ at our hands on a daily basis. These warriors are typically not the ‘shoot and scoot’ types, they will stand their ground and the barrage of posts will continue unabated till hunger pangs makes them part with their weapon system, ‘the phone’. In Punjabi, the term for ‘good for nothing’ people is ‘velle’, these velles indulge in their favourite pastime, ‘vellapanti’, in other words ‘while away the time’ at hand. These guys are typically either retired folks with plenty of ‘gyan’ on all subjects under the Sun and which nobody at home is prepared to even acknowledge or the actual vella youth of today tutored in the WhatsApp University.

WhatsApp provides them with this outlet which keeps them occupied for better part of the day or night. The issues could be as diverse as OP SINDOOR to Digital arrests, Cyber Security to Performance of Indian Cricket Team or the F35 stranded in Kerala, healthy foods, weight loss and even surefire  cure for cancers and baldness. We all have  watched the ‘Fastest finger first’ challenge in the KBC shows, well these guys can beat those winners who get to the hot seat, any day. The moment they cursorily even glance at a message, it is their duty to immediately post in the scores of groups that he/she is a member. As though a moment’s delay will invite the wrath of the Admins of the group, which may jeopardise their very existence. The funny part is the members  of these groups too are common and receive the same messages in all the groups. As if that is not enough, there are many others who don’t even bother to peruse what has been posted earlier in the group and just go ahead and do the needful. So the same message of someone gone missing will appear number of times in the group posted by anyone who came across the same post in some other group. The guy has been found and restored to his kith and kin may be an year ago. In fact in some cases these people have been forcibly got hold of again and again to send them back home, as the finders have just seen the message for the first time.

This ‘compulsive forwarding syndrome’ which is afflicting almost the whole country has now assumed epidemic proportions. We the veterans are equally guilty as we are part of our course groups in all the training academies that we have been to starting from school which may be RIMC, Sainik School, Military Schools or even KV, APS etc to National Defence Academy, here too the squadron types have their own separate group and then IMA,  Young Officers course, Degree Engineering course, Staff College, Higher Command, National Defence College, then institutions  and Units, Regimental groups and so on. Then there are the family groups, in laws, outlaws, the immediate siblings, the cousins, the distant cousins, friends and the residential society etc. One doesn’t even need to imagine, as each one of us has been subjected to this frightening tyranny of forwards almost daily and it takes us better part of the day to delete these messages, resisting the temptation to delete all in the vain hope that there might be some useful message which is likely to be lost. Perhaps the inner journalist in us in our eternal pursuit of Pulitzer for exclusive scoop, like our TV Channels claiming to be the only ones and the first ones, to report an event, imagine that the Group Admins will reward them in a similar manner.

I am sure we recall that famous story about ‘Whose Job is it Anyway’ Everybody thought that Somebody will do the job, but Nobody did which Anybody could have done. Here everybody  is convinced he is the only one and hence he must do it. If we go back to our typical Inertia of rest state, where we are loath to get up and pick up even a glass of water, preferring to order around, just be rest assured this forward will reach the millions even without your push. So just relax read it but don’t forward it, the WhatsApp Cup is already overflowing.

PS- Just one request though, this ‘don’t post’ doesn’t apply to my blogs, these you must post ;).