WhatsApp is the conduit, not the cause, of shocking violence in India
India is not, deep down, a friendly country, writes Mihir Sharma, and so has turned WhatsApp into something ‘dangerous and scary’
As far as Indians are concerned, the mobile phone was invented so we could use WhatsApp. The messaging app’s little green icon is now an inextricable part of our lives. We might survive without Facebook, which I haven’t checked in weeks. We might turn up our noses at Instagram, which seems to consist entirely of people’s vacation photos in Lisbon. We might even undergo Twitter detox days. But when an Indian has tired of WhatsApp, she has tired of life. We are members of dozens of groups — high school, college, workplace and that group from that conference three years ago which is inexplicably still active. We argue about politics, off-colour jokes and, according to Google, crash each other’s phones with incredibly data-heavy “Good Morning” messages. This last addiction has claimed even Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who plaintively complained to a group of his MPs that they never responded to his morning greetings. That was a rare strategic error on the prime minister’s part; Modi’s ...
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