A Dummy's Guide to WhatsApp

Ever since Salman Khan declared, “tere se chatting karne ki khaatir internet lagwaunga main”, nabbey-parteeshat-bhaarteeya decided to buy themselves smartphones with internet connections and installed WhatsApp to follow in his footsteps. A handful of these users have started mistaking the application for a social networking platform and it is about time that someone gives them a step-by-step guide on socially acceptable methods of WhatsApp use.

You can tell a lot about a person from his WhatsApp status message. A person with the status “at work”, “in a meeting” or “urgent calls only” will mostly be unemployed. No one with an actual job has the time to put these words up for everyone to see. Actual office goers do better things in life like scrolling through their WhatsApp contact list to zoom in on profile pictures of random people and checking the “last seen at” time of people who haven’t yet replied to their messages. The pseudo-work guy will be close friends with a person who puts up his status as “at the gym” and also has a picture of himself flexing his left bicep into a full wall mirror, clicking a self shot from his phone using his right hand. This person has a brain equivalent of a pre-Jadoo Hrithik Roshan from Koii Mil Gaya, which is also reflected in his creepy smile and the way he spells “Koii” with two i’s.

You can observe a minute’s silence for people who put up their status as “battery about to die”. They clearly need a counseling session on prioritizing life decisions because setting one’s status to inform the world that your phone is about to die over just keeping it aside and saving on some battery life is the decisional equivalent of coming out with a movie like Chennai Express after RaOne. I also give my heartfelt condolences to those who care to set their status as “sleeping”. This is only to make them believe that the reason why no one texted them while they were asleep was because people cared to read the status message.

Beware the person whose status message says “available”. More often than not, it’ll be a dude who thinks it refers to “relationship status” and also finds it funny to write “everyday” in front of the sex column in any form. Don’t fret over his existence. There’s a high chance that he’ll apply for the next season of Roadies and get his butt cheeks smacked on national television.

You will never see anyone with the status “at the movies” because the movies are not Indira Gandhi International Airport Terminal 3, where no one will ever forget to update his status across all online social networking platforms. And, you will almost always see some people with the status “Hey there! I am using WhatsApp.” Trust me when I say that even if he’s Punjabi, he’s not showing off; he’s just busy doing more important shit in life than updating a status message that no one gives a shit about.

The feature that defines your existence better than a status message is your WhatsApp profile picture. The reason why this is such an important part of your WhatsApp experience is because facebook birthday photo dedications for friends are passé; the world has moved on to WhatsApp. You are expected to change your WhatsApp picture to one with your sister on Raksha Bandhan, with your mum on Mother’s Day and to a “Keep Calm and Drink Beer” on other days. No, don’t care for if your boss has your number on his phone and he might see it. He didn’t even put up a picture with his wife on his marriage anniversary. What does he know about WhatsApp etiquette!

WhatsApp also offers you eight hundred and fifty emoticons to express yourself. It includes more than twelve types of hearts because obviously, how else will you tell a girl that “tune mere dil mein itne rang khila diye”. With eighteen different hand gestures yet not even one to give someone the finger, the sole purpose of these emoji is to make you forward one joke that creatively uses the hand gestures to depict the whole human birth cycle. The remaining eight hundred something emoticons each represent the number of times your smartphone will hang in a day because of low internal memory.

I could go on and on about this marvelous phone application, which has such useful functions like “group chat”, “broadcasts”, “voice notes” and sending someone your “location” on a map. I mean how else would you be able to discuss everything but anything remotely connected to the topic for which you create a group chat? How else would you tell someone that you’re “out of station” without sending them your location on a map? How else would you be able to send “I love you” messages in your own voice to your better half and then complain about your voice sounding ridiculous on being recorded? Oh my God, this app is so useful, I wish Rahul Gandhi would download it to his phone and let it do so much on his behalf!

And just in case you didn’t already know, this blog post has been written by Jimmy Watson, CEO of WhatsApp, who says that you have to forward this to a minimum of ten people on your WhatsApp list after which you will be registered as a frequent user and the green symbol will turn to red. If you fail to do so, it will be assumed that you are not a frequent user and your services will be terminated. This is not a hoax!