Tap to play or pause GIF Tap to play or pause GIF Amrita Marino for BuzzFeed News

My mother became addicted to WhatsApp when her mother passed away in the winter of 2013. She used it, she said, to “fill up a vacuum,” numbing her grief with the mindless banter of a handful of WhatsApp groups. In that endless stream of forwards she sent and received — the memes, the banal humor, the viral videos, the “Good Morning!” GIFs, and the hoaxes — my mother found solace. It didn’t take long for her early interest in WhatsApp to turn into obsession. She rekindled dusty relationships and joined at least a dozen groups, including a family group, a group for work colleagues, a group for school friends, a group for organic farmers, and another for environmentalists. Soon, my mother was spending half a dozen hours each day glued to her dinky Android phone, blasting her WhatsApp groups with forwards, and watching almost every GIF and video she received. Many of these forwards ended up in my WhatsApp too. Sometimes, I got them twice because there were some groups we had in common. At first, I skimmed through, replying with a quick :) . But their volume increased so rapidly that I was soon forced to stop replying entirely — there were simply too many. A few months later, my father called. “Your mother is sulking,” he said. “You haven’t been reading or replying to her WhatsApp forwards.” I was taken aback. Mom and I had been talking at least a couple of times a week on the phone. Still, she perceived me ignoring her on WhatsApp as a sort of personal affront. “I’m emotionally invested in WhatsApp,” Mom explained when I called her to apologize. “And I was hurt because you ignored me there.”

"I'm emotionally invested in WhatsApp. I was hurt because you ignored me there."

WhatsApp is now an inextricable part of India’s culture. The app has more than 200 million users in the country, and it's nearly as large as Facebook’s Indian user base itself. And while it's widely used by millennials, it's really older Indians — people like my mother, her friends, and extended family — who've embraced it with striking passion and sincerity. “To my parents, WhatsApp isn’t just an instant messenger,” said Devang Pathak, a 25-year-old writer from Mumbai. “It’s an entire social network. It’s where they catch up with family and friends, it’s where they get their news, and it’s where they watch a ton of videos. They use it so much it scares me.” Digitally savvy millennials in India post Stories on Instagram, share memes on Facebook, watch videos on YouTube, keep up on Twitter, and chat with each other on Facebook Messenger. But older Indians have incorporated the most compelling features of these platforms right into WhatsApp. Vacation pictures don’t go on Facebook or Instagram, videos don’t go on YouTube, and jokes and wisecracks don’t go on Twitter. For older Indians, WhatsApp is the ultimate social network. “Honestly, Facebook is a little complex for me,” said my mother. “And it’s not a place where I can reach everyone I care about at once like I can do in a WhatsApp group. And it’s also not, well, private.” An aunt, who is in her late sixties and who began using WhatsApp about six months ago, is now a notorious serial forwarder. But she likes it for other reasons as well. “It’s my music player,” she said. “People I know send me so many music clips on WhatsApp and I don’t know how to play music on my phone.” “My generation didn’t really have a lot of contact with people outside our immediate social circles for decades,” said another aunt in her mid-fifties. “I got hooked on WhatsApp because it was fun to see how friends who I hadn’t seen in probably 20 years looked.” Unlike some of India’s urban and affluent millennials who grew up with desktops and the internet, most older Indians largely leapfrogged desktops and went straight to smartphones as their primary computing devices over the past decade or so. “They are not digital natives like us,” said Shobha S V, a 33-year-old media professional based in Delhi. “So there’s still this childlike wonder about technology.”

"My father refuses to drive these days because he needs to look into his phone all the time."

Jayman Pandya, a 32-year-old UX designer based in Mumbai who is currently struggling to get his 60-year-old father to cut down on his WhatsApp use, said he thinks older Indians are hooked because WhatsApp is their first taste of being social on the internet. “My father refuses to drive these days because he needs to look into his phone all the time,” Pandya said. Plunging into WhatsApp’s world of GIFs, videos, and messaging has both liberated and enabled older Indians. But there’s something of a learning curve, particularly when it comes to digital etiquette. Emboldened by WhatsApp’s simplistic interface and unshackled by the limitations of SMS, many older Indians send dozens of forwards to their WhatsApp groups every single day — and some young Indians say it’s getting on their nerves. “Using WhatsApp with my family is no longer about using it to have conversations,” said one such person who declined to be named. “It’s just about wading through an endless stream of forwards. I talk to my parents on the phone.” When I tweeted, “Are you a young person pissed at how many forwards your parents send on WhatsApp?”, young Indians flooded my mentions and Direct Messages. “The constant pinging on my phone is really annoying,” said Shobha. “Remember how we used to forward email chains back in the day? This is their version of it.” Rohan Deshpande, 22, works in the hospitality industry in Chennai. He said the problem with older relatives who use WhatsApp is that they don’t really understand the concept of spam. “I get it because I’ve grown up with the internet. They haven’t,” he said. When confronted about their WhatsApp use, older Indians seem unruffled. “I share because I feel like it’s the best way to tell people how I feel or think about something,” said my mother. “I share because it helps me express myself.” “My job is to forward good content,” said a 62-year-old grandfather of two based in Bangalore who didn’t want to be named. “It’s OK if you don’t respond or reply.”



"My job is to forward good content."