The Tiny Fame of Ordinary People

Last week, I met a group of school moms, you know, moms of your kids’ classmates. As adults, this is the best way to find new friendships – tried and tested. Fate-led, as possibly all friendships are. But also, they provide something incredibly important for friendships to thrive – common ground. Same things for you to laugh about, complain about, stress about. Never ever underestimate the role of adversity in the formation of great friendships. See, even Harry, Ron and Hermione needed a troll attack to bond.

Anyway, back to the meeting. We were talking about how long it has been since we met and one mom said, but we keep seeing you and Z, on Instagram, so it does not feel like we’ve not met you in a while.

Well, there it is. The tiny fame of ordinary people… something social media made possible. What does this fame feel like? Gratification.

I remember the first time someone came up to me at a mall and said they read my blog. I was not even a famous or viral blogger. But that moment was incredible. I like to believe it was because they liked my writing, and it gave me the ultimate thrill of having an audience. It was definitely my celebrity moment. Maybe ordinary fame feels like being recognised for something you made, not just for being visible.

We are all now minor celebrities in very small circles. Even before doomscrolling was a thing, people were peeking into the lives of their neighbours, their colleagues, long-lost cousins, that one person they had a crush on for one and a half weeks in high school. Things that were private, or controlled earlier, were laid out for the world to see – birthday parties, haircuts, the exact flavour of coffee that morning.

Growing up in Bombay, I always loved the anonymity the city gave us. No one was in our business. No one. I’ve lived on the ground floor of a building, and being ardent fans of natural light and fresh air that we were, we opened our curtains and windows ever so often. And there weren’t people constantly peeping into our home. Maybe the occasional creeps did, they are everywhere, as I remind my daughter once a day, but I was too young to know the minor inconveniences.

As against Delhi, where the slightest increase in decibel levels had neighbours flocking over. I’ve actually heard an incident where a neighbour rang the doorbell to ask what was happening, while it was happening. And no, this was not a well-disguised attempt to break a domestic abuse situation. This was a mother yelling at her son for habitually skipping tuition.

It did not create curiosity. People were always curious. It simply made looking into other people’s lives easier, quieter, and socially acceptable. In some ways, social media has made neighbourhood aunties of all of us.

And before we knew it, we let people outside the six degrees of separation into our lives. I know, I know, I’ve been there, done that. But I am not judging those who have, maybe a teensy bit, myself included. But I do think we’ve taken it a bit too far when we ask total strangers in far-flung corners of the world to choose our lipstick for the day – all is fair in love, war, and content creation.

But social media also made it possible to keep adult friendships alive despite oceans, time zones, kids’ schedules and workplace fatigue trying to kill them. My mom connected with her school besties after they had lost touch. The teenage girls got married and left, memories in each other’s minds and black-and-white photographs of their wedding days. She found her after thirty years on Facebook. Can you imagine the joy?

And yes, I know it’s not all warm and fuzzy. There are dark sides to it – the dopamine addiction, the wasted time, the cutting off from real people, the predators. But that is the world we live in. All these exist in real life too, maybe in hidden forms and smaller proportions.

The tiny fame of ordinary people is strange. Sometimes annoying. Sometimes intrusive. Sometimes deeply satisfying. Sometimes genuinely useful. It is not friendship. But it is not mere acquaintance either. It is something more intimate and more distant at the same time. I think we need a totally new vocabulary to fully describe it.

Maybe we need a new vocabulary for it. For people who know your child has grown taller, but not what is worrying you. People who know you travelled, but not whether the trip helped. People who know you were at a birthday party, but not whether you came home happy or tired or mildly annoyed by the tantrums your kid threw there. They know the visible parts. Not the story behind the story.

Seeing someone’s life on social media is not the same as knowing their life. But maybe it keeps the thread alive. Maybe that is what the tiny fame of ordinary people really gives us. Not friendship. Not closeness. But a kind of intimate distance. And sometimes, that is enough to keep the door open until real conversation can walk in.

Maybe it gives adult friendships a small place to wait while real life is busy doing what real life does best – getting in the way. Maybe it lets school moms say, “We keep seeing you,” and old friends say, “I found you,” and someone in a mall say, “I read you.”

None of this replaces the actual meeting. But sometimes, it makes the next meeting possible. And then, when you finally sit across from someone, the real conversation can begin. Not with “Who are you now?” But with “Tell me properly.”