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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. The app has more than 200 million users in the country, and it's nearly as large as Facebook’s Indian user base itself. WhatsApp is now an inextricable part of India’s culture. “And I was hurt because you ignored me there.” “I’m emotionally invested in WhatsApp,” Mom explained when I called her to apologize. Still, she perceived me ignoring her on WhatsApp as a sort of personal affront. Mom and I had been talking at least a couple of times a week on the phone. “You haven’t been reading or replying to her WhatsApp forwards.” I was taken aback. But their volume increased so rapidly that I was soon forced to stop replying entirely - there were simply too many. At first, I skimmed through, replying with a quick :). Sometimes, I got them twice because there were some groups we had in common. Many of these forwards ended up in my WhatsApp too. 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.

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. It didn’t take long for her early interest in WhatsApp to turn into obsession. 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. She used it, she said, to “fill up a vacuum,” numbing her grief with the mindless banter of a handful of WhatsApp groups. My mother became addicted to WhatsApp when her mother passed away in the winter of 2013.

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