A little over a decade ago I sat huddled on my cozy bed in Delhi, watching a dreadful sight unfold on television. There were just a handful of news channels on air then, and they all had the same ‘breaking news’: torrential rains in Mumbai had brought the city to a standstill. July 26, 2005 also happened to be the day my then fiancé was moving house from his bachelor’s accommodation in the megacity to what would be our marital home. With the cellphone networks up in a tizzy, the only way one could keep track of anything was to stare at what seemed to be a dam-burst, on TV. I could only hope that one of the vehicles flooded till their steering wheels and stranded on flyovers, did not belong to the aforementioned betrothed!
Fast forward to 2016. In a little over ten years, social media has become the fastest and most accurate disaster information system. Come rains and there will be a hashtag trending on Twitter with details about flooded areas, vehicle breakdowns and even people offering shared rides or a safe place for the night. During the Chennai floods last year, anxious relatives banked heavily on the social media to track their loved ones. Call it whatever names that you might, the truth is that in times of chaos, the social media has been proven to bring together a sense of a helpful community better than any other information tool that we have had before.
The useful groupHaving said that, the social tool that has come to my rescue time and again (especially in my functioning as a responsible mother of two kids!) is the WhatsApp group feature. One cannot be a parent in the city and not be on a WhatsApp group. It is almost like a de facto consequence of begetting kids. One may or may not be part of the Good morning/Good night and Santa/Banta jokes-forwarding section of groups; however, during monsoons these groups work faster than GPS. So the rule of thumb is to ‘mute’ the group until crisis strikes.
Like yesterday, when the unfortunate combination of high tide and non-stop rains made the school bus delayed by a whole hour. Which meant that my child was on a bus somewhere in the 8-km-route between school and home for almost two hours. And of course, the bus tracking system did not work!
To the rescue came the mothers on the bus WhatsApp group who kept barraging the school for information and ensured that we were updated about our kids’ whereabouts every few minutes. For a person like me who hesitates to intervene till crisis really looms large, this was a godsend. All I needed to do was to keep checking my messages.
Indeed, the social media and other collective messaging services are a boon for the low-engagers in any group. As a silent group member on most platforms — be it Facebook or Twitter or Instagram — I still benefit immensely from the information shared there.
Over the years, I have also learnt to skim past negativity and what I have come to identify as time-wasting content (long, convoluted forwards with needless amounts of emotions, emojis and exclamation marks).
Which is why, this monsoon, along with ensuring that there are no leaks in the house and that the umbrellas are serviceable, I updated all social media apps to the latest version. After all, there is really no excuse that one can have anymore to be caught unawares in the rain.
The author is the founding editor of www.mumbaimom.com E-mail her at nidhibruce@gmail.com
