Whatever apped to WhatsApp, peeps!

Peace descended on Earth for a while when India's largest university stopped functioning for almost two hours on Tuesday. With WhatsApp down and people unable to send or receive messages to enrich themselves with the kind of knowledge that seems enriching to them, the world as we know it almost stopped, only to be replaced by birdsong, chitchat and images of people working without distractions. Meta, the company that owns the messaging platform, announced - on other platforms, including its own Facebook - that it was aware of the outage in many countries. But we suspect that it was beta-testing a new revenue model that may comprise - wait for it - paying for the use of WhatsApp!

'Free' things, even when they are charged nominally, seem horrendously expensive. Imagine a rich Punjab farmer actually being told to pay for his irrigation water and pay full price for electricity. He would probably turn to manufacturing. To make people get a hint of what it is without WhatsApp - unless they pay for it - could Meta have turned the tap off for almost a couple of hours? The IT ministry wants to know WhatApped, perhaps suspecting something similar. For the sake of civilisational safety, however, we suggest you take the temporary crash of WhatsApp as a taste of things to come: a world without free WhatsApp, Twitter, Google....