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When the WhatsApp blue tick carries the weight of one's emotions
Times and technology have changed, so has the way we communicate. Yet human emotions and fundamental needs have stayed the same
- PUBLISHED: Thu 24 Jul 2025, 8:46 PM
During her dawn-to midnight rigmarole as a housemaker, there were moments when Amma talked to herself, apparently cribbing about something that hadn’t materialised. She even threw tantrums at the peak of her desperation, and yours truly took the brunt of all her paroxysm. Her other incidental victims included a murder of crows or chickens stealing from the granary, neighbourhood kids running amuck through our property, and stray cattle that grabbed a mouthful from our kitchen garden.
“On the way back from the grocery, check with the postman if there’s an airmail for me,” she would remind every day. So, the trigger would always emerge as a much-anticipated letter from her brother who lived in Sri Lanka. “Got your letter, thank you so much. Will write later as I am busy at the moment— Can’t he send one line like this on a post card?” she would murmur sitting in the verandah, if there’s a listener in the proximity.
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One of the most valuable lessons I have learned from her tantrums is that to ‘acknowledge’ is more important than to ‘respond’ or ‘react’. The degree of consanguinity between the words acknowledge, admit, respond, react etc, is so great that people typically choose to play on the back foot and ignore messages and mails, however trivial the issues written about are.
The Indian Post and Telegraph Department knew the pulse of society way back in time. The department offered an acknowledgement service at an additional cost of Rs3 (Dh0.13 approximately). This service was available for various types of postal articles, including letters, parcels, journals, books, and more, as long as they were registered. The acknowledgement card was sent back to the original sender via ordinary post after the recipient signed for and received the registered article, so that people like job applicants could be at peace.
Fast forward to the era of social media. Times and technology have changed, so has the way we communicate. Generation Alpha may not have any clue about the snail mail that took weeks and months to reach the destination. Human thought process has gathered lightning speed to keep pace with new technologies that define smart homes and offices. Artificial intelligence can think and articulate on behalf of you and create masterpieces in fine arts and literature.
Yet human emotions and fundamental needs have stayed the same, forcing tech firms to find multiple options to fill the souls. They knew the importance of acknowledgement, without which the world would come to a loveless planet.
While different platforms have different ways of flagging acknowledgements, Facebook rolled out a Blue Tick feature in 2014 to indicate the recipient had opened and read the message. This feature replaced the previous two grey checkmarks, which indicated the message delivery.
This did not go down well with millions of customers, including my son, who preferred privacy over mannerisms. But is it really about privacy? If your parent, friend, partner or lover comes to know you have read their message, how does it hurt your ego, unless there is a hidden motive. Similarly, how does it matter if someone got to know when you were last seen on a platform which millions use to pour their hearts out? Isn’t cowardice to hide behind the iron curtain of a single or double grey tick mark doing whatever you want and at the same time unscrupulously monitor the brave hearts online.
Then the next morning they would stop you in the office corridor or in the washroom to shamelessly daunt you with comments like, “Hey man, who are you talking to late in the night these days?” And those sons of guns wouldn’t say what they were doing behind the grey ticks. While “none of your business” is the response they deserve, we just look them in the eye with a grey smile and move on with our business.
Unacknowledged or unread messages give heart burns to sensitive people like yours truly. A typical self-talk after watching unread messages we had sent to someone so close to our heart would go like this:
Ten minutes after the message delivery: “Come on, pick up the phone and read.”
Half-an-hour later: “Oho, why should such people have a phone?”
An hour later: “No, I’m not going to
send a reminder. No one is too busy in the world to read messages. Can’t they hear the notification.”
Ninety minutes later: “If this is the way a lover wants to go about a relationship, so be it. It really hurts. Let me switch off
the phone.” We then go on an egoistic rollercoaster.
And this happened at the time of the deadly Texas floods on July 4. Vanshika had sent a selfie in the morning and then disappeared into thin air. Weeks of reminders and queries went unanswered, and our chat window turned into a sea of grey ticks. She lives in Florida, a 20-hour drive from Texas, so the chances of she being in the calamitous area was so remote. I was so distraught, though she was no one to me. We were nothing more than two fellow human beings.
Three weeks after her disappearance, I got this insensitive message that provoked me into an outburst:
“Morning….how’s everything going on your end?”
“Don’t talk to me. How dare you ask
so casually?
“Why, what happened to you?”
“Where were you all this while? Totally cut off. I was worried because of
the floods.”
“I understand now and I’m really sorry for going silent like that. I was at the hospital with my aunt, she wasn’t well, and things were a bit overwhelming. I never intended to shut you out.”
“I know I’m nobody to you, but when you vanished during the flash floods, I was emotionally washed away.”
“Your words mean a lot. I now understand the power of acknowledgment and I’m sorry I let you down with my silence.”
All’s well that ends well, but the conundrum of acknowledgement can make or break relationships.
