To insta or not

 4^th August 2024

There used to be two popular children books when I was a kid – Nandan and Champak. I preferred Champak as Nandan would just have stories and lessons thereupon. I have always been a poor reader…till date. Champak had this jokes section called ‘dekho hans na dena’. But, I would laugh….and be proud that the publishers didn’t even get to know I laughed. As a kid, that was my moral victory when they had specifically asked me not to. I reckon a lot of my optimism in life has come from this constant moral victory I achieved. Kids are literal. I remained literal. I can’t read in between the lines. In fact, even this phrase doesn’t make sense – why do people even try to do that when there’s nothing written in between the lines. People don’t even read the lines properly, so why to be so ambitious to attempt to read in between.

I have been working out since few months. There was a fad at one time to do 10,000 steps as your daily healthy goal. I would try but fail every time. I would even put my phone in someone else’s bag or pocket to gain step count but it will still come short of even 3,000. Now it’s like a ‘cakewalk’ to achieve 10,000 steps. I can do that perhaps for my entire neighbourhood, I am sure my neighbour Richard will appreciate as he injured his leg. I don’t know why they use ‘cakewalk’ for calling something simple. If someone is walking on a cake I’d presume it would get very messy. And which cake – birthday cake, pancake, cow dung cake?! With all the clean up involved, it should rather be used for a difficult job.

Last week I was sick with viral so I was resting in bed and listening to some comic acts. The inspiration I got is that there should rather be a new challenge. A challenge to complete your day in no more than 50 steps. No kidding, but I am sure most ultra urban Indian people would easily achieve that. Last month visiting family back home, I asked my mom that dad is getting so weak, has bhaiya started to bring milk from the shops?

In my brother’s world, the household chores, buying any grocery or any house work for that matter has always been a mythological stuff. He refuses to believe that these tasks are part of basic survival skills required in a civilised human society. He thinks everything somehow happens by magic and people around him have no role to play. The other magical thing was he offered to drop me to the airport. I have done numerous trips back to airport in last 15 years but this was the first time ever he gave this offer. I straight away imagined that my brother is the Godfather and this is that offer I can’t refuse. And I didn’t. Anyways I digress.

So my mother brags that no one has to go to the shop now, the shopwala just hangs the milk on the front gate every morning. She continues that sabjiwala, fruit wala, they all come to the doorstep as well. Wow, this was the last basic life skill this family had to apply and they have killed that opportunity as well. I wonder what tasks a household in India has to do! There’s kaamwaali for all the cleaning, dusting, dishes, clothes, making bed etc. There’s cook to make all the food. There’s kudewala to collect all the garbage. There’s maali for the gardens, pots and plants. And now no more shop-run to buy anything, all at the doorstep! Talking about maali - no we don’t call them phoolwala. They are the ones you rush to buy the flower bouquet when you couldn’t give much thought on what gift to buy, and coz there are many like you, the recipient of the gift can’t remember who gave which flowers. Some enterprising kids would take the rose bouquet and start playing ‘ringa ringa roses’, and even till the adult hood we never get corrected that it actually is ‘ring around the roses’. Fun fact: The career line of phoolwala was started because once upon a time when dinosaurs ruled the world, one idiot salesman forgot to buy gift for his girlfriend’s birthday and then rushed to his garden and collected some flowers, put a thread around it and here you go – bob is your uncle. He did such a tremendous job at selling her the idea and that why getting her the ubiquitous fragrance that will last only for a temporary period till they reach home is far more precious than a gold heart shaped locket. However, the protagonist of this story is not that idiot salesman boyfriend but the marwari businessman who was standing by, listened to everything and converted this into a business opportunity.  So that’s how this new career line of phoolwala was started.

To be honest, my household in India still does some trips to the shop for certain things (not my brother, though). But when I talk to friends and people of my age bracket in India, they have reached nirvana from the worldly cycle of house chores. There was no single task that the phone couldn’t do for them. And when you add Alexa on top of that, you don’t even need to trouble your fingers. I asked someone that won’t you get old very soon from this sedentary lifestyle, and the response I get is ‘there’s always photoshop’! No wonder India is a land of software powerhouse immersed in a parallel social media life. And here I am, grinding myself through workout, diet control and the retinol to achieve the same result.

Taking no more than 50 steps will be easily achievable by ultra urban Indians. Given all their household chores, shopping and food is already taken care of, all they need to do is number 1 and number 2. Apparently these are universally acceptable numbers for your daily business. Unless you have a prostate problem, let’s account for 4 toilet trips with 5 steps each way, that’s your 40 steps. As a side note, funny how taboo the word prostate was for some Americans. Once I wrote an article for Stern business school’s newsletter with a word prostate in it. The editor removed that word and made some dumbed down version of her own. We were the students who were supposedly destined to be the next CxOs or investment bankers on wall street but couldn’t handle the word prostate. Coming back to maths, this still leaves the extra enthusiastic souls with 10 more steps in a day who have had an extra dose of adrak-wali chai made by bhaiya ji.

This reminds me that how common the word ‘bhaiya ji’ has become in India, especially among the south Delhi, south Mumbai famed people. The word bhaiya although literally used to define relationship with your brother has been historically used to add to a name to give respect to another person. Bhaiya in most hindi speaking states, bhai in Gujarat eg dheerubhai ambani, paaji in Punjabi, dada in Bengal etc and similarly we have behen (Mayavati behen), didi (Mamta didi), ben (Kokila ben) etc. for the females. ‘Ji’ is another word of respect, and we similarly have ‘garu’ or ‘thaliava’ in south India, or  ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ in English. There are other such words like shri, shriman, shrimati, mr, mrs etc. Over a period of time, bhaiya has become so ubiquitous and pervasive across India that people will call any random person as bhaiya whom they believe to be financially, culturally, racially or generally inferior to you. It could be used to say ‘excuse me’ but with respect. This also eliminates the need to know or remember the name of that other person and still sound respectful, while in reality you may or may not. Essentially ‘bhaiya’ has become the name of the entire Indian population of ‘have nots’. Interestingly, my dear ultra urban Indian population started believing that ‘bhaiya’ actually is a name and we need to add the word ‘ji’ to it to make it respectful, and that’s the genesis of the word ‘bhaiya ji’. It is actually quiet funny when you break it down and ponder – you are basically calling someone ‘sir sir’ or ‘ji ji’. It’s not funny for us in India though. In fact, we have gone one step further. At the cost of offending some people, the founder of Art of living foundation and a well known spiritual leader is known by the name ‘Shri Shri Ravi Shankar”. They have got one step further and blatantly gave themselves two respectful words right at the start of their name. What’s a better way to formalise the sentiments behind ‘bhaiya ji’ with the audacity of our spiritual leader’s shri square.

So the people are getting more and more tech savvy but less and less familiar with the basics. That said, India have always had two faces with much polarisation between rich and poor, haves and have nots, touchables and untouchables, English speaking and non-english speaking, educationally qualified and not, north and south, golden Indian era and remnants of colonisation. The new one emerging is the technology savvy and non tech savvy. I am convinced that I fall under the latter. I reckon I was quite progressive when I moved out of India in 2007 but my primitive second home in Australia has kept me out of bounds with the technology and gave me pots and pans, broom, mop, hoe, shovel, rake, water hose et al. I am since just working to hone my basic survival skills required in the civilised human society without any tech support. Within these years, India leaped and zoomed past me in the realm of technology. 

Talking about technology, I was recently introduced by a friend to this app called Instagram. I won’t take her name to avoid any confrontation and further humiliation. But Yashika tells me that if you don’t know what reels are then you are literally ‘outdated’. As I said before, I am still literal so I understood it exactly the way it was said. Although me being me and not wanting to be seen as a pushover, I tried to get out of it by asking, ‘why can’t you do the same thing in facebook?” “It’s old-fashioned”, I get a logic-free, terminal response. I didn’t want to appear to be ‘outdated’ and ‘old-fashioned’ so I opened the account.

Reels is the buzzword of Insta. It took me time to get my mind around that it’s not the same ‘reels’ that my Grade 7 photography teacher Johny used to call the photographic camera films. By the way, Johny was his nickname and I never got to know what his real name was. I just couldn’t call him ‘bhaiya ji’ though. I wonder why the creators would evolve the vocabulary that’s known to all as they bring a new technology. If that’s their key differentiation factor, then my faith is already shaky in the core creativity that they are selling. 

Professor Amit Sachdeva was my micro economics teacher during my first year in Delhi University. I used to like him – perhaps the only teacher whose classes I attended in all three years without attendance pressure. His very first day and he asked the entire class, “what’s the proper way of saying ‘movies’”. No one could answer. I reckon we were all just bunch of late teen nerds with single track mind who could only see course books and the exam paper. If the question was to solve square root of 329 with power of 6 divided by log of 128 with sigma reaching to e multiplied by the enthusiasm of showing the entire class your mathematical powers, then I am sure some Bansal in our class would have shouted out loud in less than 30 seconds. And with a bonus graph of sensitivity analysis. Prof Sachdeva says, “it’s motion pictures, because it’s a collection of moving pictures”. I learnt something new. The other thing he said was his two favourite books were ‘The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand’ and ‘Les Miserables by Victor Hugo’. By sheer respect, I did read ‘The Fountainhead’ later in my life which was the thickest book I ever read and will ever read. Luckily, they made a motion picture on ‘Les Miserables’.

Motion pictures evolved into movies. When internet and social media arrived, movies evolved into clips. Clips essentially meant that you won’t have to go through full trauma of watching a motion picture if the original editor has not done a good enough job, the social media editors will clip or cut the motion picture right to the point what you should be watching. No foreplay required. I wonder why the actual motion picture editors wouldn’t do the same thing if that’s what the target audience ever wanted to see. A case in point is the popularity of the Titanic clip where Leonardo DiCaprio is painting Kate Winslet that youngsters watched again and again seemingly mistaking Leonardo DiCaprio for Leonardo Da Vinci. James Cameron could have filled the entire three hours with that clip on repeat mode and still have got the same or perhaps even better rating.

When facebook arrived, it was arrogant enough to use the plain vanilla version – ‘video’. YouTube branded it with ‘YouTube Video’ and later introduced ‘shorts’ to perhaps compete with the insta reels’ popularity.

Insta gave it the nomenclature ‘reels’. Reels achieved the breakthrough as they catered to the low attention span of ultra urban Indians or Gen Z millennials, they would like to call themselves. You will also find your chachiji, mamiji, mausiji, buaji, jijaji, fufaji, dubai wali auntiji etc etc. but don’t get fooled by that demographic, who are just there due to FOMO and heaps of disposable time – what’s better way to avoid being a social outcast. Reels hit the chord with that pretentious Indian population who is apparently ever busy and the only time they can afford to take out is to watch short reels. Someone clearly forgot to do the maths that the number of reels you watch is a key multiplier to arrive at the total hours you spend on insta.  I heard that the smartest trick devil ever played was to make people believe that he doesn’t exist. The insta trick appears to be smarter!

Recently I learned about a feature in insta called ‘story’. Apparently it has nothing to do with the stories as people know but you just add a picture and call it a story! The audacity of insta is that they make it available only for 24 hours, which is nothing different then mere a post but the expectation is that people run towards watching that due to the scarcity of its lifetime. Perhaps Aaj Tak flashes a breaking news for everytime someone puts up a Story. The concept is something like a meteor shower that everyone puts an alarm to watch at night, while the ever beautiful googolplex stars in the milkyway and beyond are available on an everyday basis. Oh sorry, I never meant to compare the insta posts with the stars, but you get the gist!

My take on insta is that you spend hours and hours and hours in watching ridiculously small motion pictures, created by some random people and they would finish even before you would get the hang of the topic, jam your feet into it or try to have a hearty laugh. They have no continuity, there’s rarely any message or knowledge enhancement and there’s no loyalty, still there’s always hope that all this effort on Instagram will make sense in the end. By the time there’s not even an end (because there’s never one), you have burnt hours off your precious life in the world’s utmost crappy concept sold to the people who generated extra time by reducing their 10,000 steps to just 50! 

Here are some stats – Half of Indian population is on whatsapp and one out of four is on Instagram. Both apps award top position to India in the world. Talking about stats and pole positions, last I checked we had 3 bronze in Paris, thanks to that one Haryana female and that other shooter we never heard the name of. I’d love to know how active they both are on social media. There’s nothing wrong with socialisation but the jury is still out on whatever happened to the human touch. What baffles me is that in a Country where every 4^th person is still below poverty line, the other 3 are sitting on their comfy cushion like thing (bed or couch, most likely in a horizontal position) and either moving their thumbs quickly enough to type a text that beats the speed of vocal chords or just flicking up their thumb looking for that next reel that can release their dopamine. Perhaps the Indian population control department, if that exists, can use the stats in their marketing campaign. If you don’t stop after 2 kids (read: hum do hamaare do), in a best case scenario, the 3^rd kid will be living below poverty line, and it will go worse when you go to the 4^th kid who would definitely be an insta freak. 

 As an innocent first timer, I got sucked into this during my vulnerable state of viral infection. When I looked at the time after my first intense Instagram session, these were the words that came out of my mouth “Holy shit!” I reckon this phrase was pre coined centuries ago in anticipation that one day instagram would be invented and this would be the most befitting phrase to describe it. It's holy for the people who spend hours and hours on it, while in reality they are just proving that their life is shit.  

Finally, if you were patient enough to read through this epic literary effort of mine, it’s just one thing I’d like you to take away – “Instagram app is a total waste of time, I suggest it’s time you get a life!”