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Dhruv Saxena
It started with a forward.
It always starts with a forward. That is phase one of every Indian mother's relationship with a new technology. Before the Reels, before the YouTube videos, before anything else, there are the forwards. Good morning images with sunrises. Motivational quotes over photographs of mountains. Health tips that have been forwarded so many times the image quality has degraded to the point where the text is barely readable. My mother sent these for years. I received them every morning at 7am with the reliability of an alarm clock I had not set and could not turn off.
I thought this was the ceiling. I thought the forwards were as far as it went.
I was wrong.
The Reels arrived about eighteen months ago. I do not know exactly who showed her. I suspect my cousin, who has a lot to answer for. But one day my mother called me and said she had found something on Instagram and did I know you could send videos from there.
I said yes, I knew.
She said she was going to send me one.
The video was forty-five seconds long and was about the correct way to store onions. My mother does not need to be told how to store onions. She has been storing onions correctly since before I existed. But she had found this video, she had found it useful or at least interesting, and she had sent it to me because she thought I should know.
This was the beginning.
I was home the following weekend. She was sitting at the kitchen table, phone in hand, Mom's Magic biscuits on the table next to her chai because that is just the default state of my mother's kitchen table, and she was watching something on her phone with the focused concentration she usually reserves for cooking something complicated.
I sat down across from her. She did not look up.
"What are you watching," I asked.
"A video," she said.
"About what."
"This woman is showing how to make the dough softer."
She already makes excellent dough. She has been making excellent dough for thirty years. But she was watching this video with complete attention, occasionally nodding, occasionally making a small sound of either agreement or disagreement that I could not interpret. When it ended she immediately started another one.
The algorithm had her.
The Phase Two Acceleration
Within three weeks of discovering Reels, my mother was following forty-seven accounts.
I know this because she told me. She told me with a slight pride that suggested she felt this was a reasonable and even impressive number. The accounts were mostly cooking, some health and wellness, two or three that appeared to be general life advice delivered by women of a similar age to her, and one account that posted exclusively about indoor plants that she had started following even though we do not have indoor plants and she has never expressed any interest in indoor plants.
I asked about the plant account.
She said the woman was very knowledgeable.
I did not pursue this.
The Reels she sends me have also diversified considerably from the initial onion storage video. The categories now include: cooking techniques she thinks I should know, health information she considers relevant to my specific situation, videos of animals doing things she finds funny or touching, content about Bangalore that she has found while researching my city, recipes she thinks I should try, and occasionally videos that have nothing to do with anything but that she found interesting and wanted to share.
Last Tuesday she sent me a Reel of a dog learning to open a door. No context. No message attached. Just the video. I watched it. The dog did eventually open the door. I sent back a thumbs up. She replied with three heart emojis. This is now a form of communication we have.
The Tagging
The tagging began about a month after the Reels.
My mother discovered that you could tag people in things on Instagram. This was, from her perspective, a significant upgrade. Previously she had to send things individually through WhatsApp. Now she could tag me directly on the platform, which meant I would be notified, which meant I could not claim I had not seen it.
She tags me in cooking videos. She tags me in health articles. She tags me in things that are captioned in languages she cannot read but whose images she has found appealing. She once tagged me in a Reel that turned out, upon watching it, to be an advertisement for a blender. I do not know how she found this. I do not know why she tagged me. I do not have a blender problem that she is aware of.
My friend Karan's mother has taken the tagging further. She tags him in things and then calls him ten minutes later to ask if he has seen the thing she tagged him in. The call is not to discuss the thing. The call is to confirm receipt. Once he confirms he has seen it, the call ends. She just wants to know the tag landed.
He has started watching the tagged content immediately upon receiving the notification so that when the call comes he can say yes and describe what he saw. This has reduced the average call length significantly. He considers this an optimisation.
The Following Problem
My mother now follows several accounts that follow her back, which means she occasionally receives comments on her own posts from people she does not know.
This has created a new category of phone call. The call where she reads me a comment from a stranger and asks what it means. Not always a complicated comment. Sometimes it is just an emoji she does not recognise. She will read the emoji's description to me from some reference she has found and ask if this is a positive thing or a negative thing to receive in the comments.
I have explained the aubergine emoji situation to my mother. I will not go into details. It was a complicated conversation.
She also follows three accounts that post exclusively in English, which she does not read fluently, and has developed a system where she watches the video first, forms her own interpretation of what is being said based on the visual content, and then asks me to confirm whether her interpretation is correct. Her interpretations are about sixty percent accurate, which is actually impressive given the methodology.
The Current Situation
My mother now spends approximately forty minutes per day on Instagram. This is more time than she spends on any other leisure activity except possibly watching her serials, and the serials have competition for the first time in years.
She has opinions about creators. She has a favourite cooking account and a second favourite cooking account and she has noted specific differences in their approaches that she considers significant. She told me last week that one of them oversalts consistently and the other has a heavy hand with oil. She said this with the authority of someone who has spent thirty years cooking and can identify these things by watching someone else cook on a small screen.
She is probably right. She usually is about these things.
The forwards have not stopped. They have simply been supplemented. Every morning at 7am I still receive the good morning image with the sunrise. But now, at irregular intervals throughout the day, I also receive Reels about onion storage and dogs opening doors and Bangalore weather and recipes I should try.
I watch all of them. Not because they are always relevant. Because she found them and thought of me and sent them, which is, when you think about it, exactly what she has always done.
The format has changed. The impulse is the same.
She is still telling me things she thinks I should know. She is still checking that I have eaten, sometimes literally through a Reel about nutrition. She is still present in my day in small ways that add up to something larger.
The algorithm showed her forty-seven accounts worth following. None of them are as worth following as she is.
