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WhatsApp family groups in India are often sad spaces these days as the covid-19 pandemic continues to cause thousands of deaths across the country every day.
But in some of those who have yet to be touched by the tragedy, the jokes and sour memes are causing tension, said Megha Mohan, the BBC’s gender and identity correspondent.
As my finger floated over the “leave group” button, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had considered leaving the family group on WhatsApp. Although I frequently escape groups that are still alive even after their original function has been fulfilled, I have never escaped a group that my loved ones were in.
Can you imagine how loud a band with members on three continents can be? Much more than they think.
Content is shared daily, across three different time zones. When the India-based delegation falls asleep, the battalion in the United States takes over to ensure a constant flow of memes, nephew videos and sometimes expert opinions on big global issues, like elections or the divorce from a famous person.
I’m generally a sensitive person, frequently sending out heart-shaped emojis on photos of children or pets. She wasn’t the type to strike up a conversation. Until a few weeks ago, when I shared the April 26 New York Times cover photo in the family group.
India was the main problem, with an aerial photo of dozens of funeral pyres that saw a handful of mourners in protective gear. The headline read: “Cremations Never End”.
Another family member followed up with a link to an Australian article which accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of leading India into what he called “an apocalypse”.
The pandemic shows no signs of abating in India.
It was then that a cousin who lives in the country intervened.
“All countries have suffered and no government has managed this successfully,” he wrote. “And the media is predominantly biased … all over the world, they have their own agenda.”
Another cousin followed with a meme. He said: “The whole world is worried about India. Indians are worried about whether the maid is coming today or not.” A yellow crying laughing emoji accompanied the text.
I started to feel the seething anger of spending too much time on social media.
I was there, looking at my phone from my flat in London, vaccinated and furious that my family in India were sending memes and laughing at my expense (as a journalist I decided to take the media bias observation personally) .
Vulnerable ms class
Headlines on India in the UK have been dominated by images of near war hospital workers, calls for oxygen and thousands of deaths every day with no end in sight to the pandemic.
My family, all middle class and college graduates, had luckily dodged the virus.
The covid-19 pandemic continues to infect thousands of people across the country every day.
Numerous headlines suggest that the COVID-19 crisis in India has made the poor particularly vulnerable, although, of course, many wealthy have said they could not find a bed in any hospital, including the former Indian Ambassador to Bruni. , in Mozambique and Algeria, Ahok Amrohi, who died in April in the parking lot of a hospital while awaiting admission.
According to the National Movement of Domestic Workers, more than 4 million people work as assistants in the wealthiest homes in the country, like my family’s.
But unofficial estimates place this amount at 50 million. My Delhi colleagues reported that the vast majority of these workers had lost their jobs.
That’s why the maid’s meme particularly irritated me. And just then I saw a tweet from a New York-based writer. “I am about to leave my Desi family’s WhatsApp group,” he said. The reason? The jokes on covid.
Different perspectives
After a brief research on the networks, I found that a considerable number of WhatsApp users did not identify with their family’s jokes about COVID-19 and that the majority were Indians.
India, with some 340 million active users, is the largest market for WhatsApp. The Indians also form the largest dispora in the world. According to UN data, 18 million Indians live abroad.
Indian emigrants form the largest dispora in the world.
“It has a lot to do with the differences in perspective,” says Delhi-based researcher Dr Charusmita.
“If that same meme had been sent to another middle-class person living in India, they probably would have seen it differently. This is not about dehumanizing domestic service, but rather making fun of their own privileges. For some, it’s a pretty innocent way to find relief in the midst of a large-scale disaster, ”he says.
“Some people resort to this humor circulating on WhatsApp and others find it disgusting.”
But people who live in the country are not keen on remembering the differences in their lifestyles and values because they feel sponsored, says the expert.
Charusmita told me that she was sent several memes that a Western audience, as well as those who disliked her, could not relate to, including cartoons of people taking selfies with dying patients, a mockery of how death was now a product of social media.
Harmless memes
There are also milder versions of the daily humor of lockdowns that cause less controversy in WhatsApp family groups.
One of them showed a photo of Prime Minister Modi performing the one nostril yoga breathing, Nadi Shodhana Pranayama, with a comment that read: “Modiji, breathing through one nostril so that others get more oxygen . ”
“There has been a lot of talk about the misinformation that abounds in Indian WhatsApp groups, but not so much about the dark humor that is there,” says Dr Rohit Dasgupta of the University of Glasgow, who specializes in Indian digital culture. “When we laugh, there is hope, and hope takes away the pain.”
“There is also pride”
Part of the pain also comes from the frustration of being seen as a third world country when just a few weeks ago India was a major exporter of AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
According to the Indian government, more than 90 countries (from Syria to the UK) have received vaccines made in India, totaling over 60 million doses.
More than 90 countries have received vaccines made in India.
“There is also pride there,” said Dasgupta. “While it is clear that India needs help, the Indians who live in the country want it to be known that they can help themselves too.”
“Let’s move on to something else”
Later, whoever forwarded the meme to maid, my cousin from Kerala sent me a private message to clarify that his intention was not to disrespect Indian domestic workers at all.
It was a joke, he said, maybe not even very funny, indicating a brighter future, in which familiar routines would return.
It was almost two in the morning in India and he had just returned from a shift at a hospital where he works as a primary care doctor, treating patients with Covid-19.
Then I spoke to a reporter in Delhi, who told me that his WhatsApp groups in recent weeks had turned into a “funeral bulletin”, where friends posted obituaries for loved ones or made requests for help. to find hospital beds for their families. Affected knowledge.
The conversation on the ground with Indian residents, he said, was questionable.
He didn’t leave the WhatsApp family group, of course.
India has been hit hard by the pandemic.
A member shared images of one of the kids who decided to do a fashion photoshoot while cleaning a closet and dozens of heart emojis flooded the screen.
We move on.
Black mood
- A 2012 study on black humor in Psychological Science explained this using the “benign transgression theory”. The theory is based on the idea that people enjoy moral transgressions and threats to their normal world view, but only as long as those transgressions are harmless.
- The same study said that a joke is funny if there is psychological distance. In other words, a person must feel that there is enough physical space or time for the event to find humor in it.
- A small-scale 2017 study of 156 people published in the journal Cognitive Processing found that intelligence plays a key role in the appreciation of black humor. People with higher IQs liked dark jokes more.
- A 2003 study published in the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health found that dark humor used by first responders had a general beneficial effect on patients.
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