Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Last winter a fever kept me in my hostel room for three days. My phone, propped against a water bottle, lit up every few minutes. There were thirty-odd groups on it: the class group, the batch group, a group for a trek that never happened, and one named only with a cricket-ball emoji. Between them they sent some four hundred messages a day. Not one of them asked where I was. Nobody had noticed that I was gone, and that, I think, was nobody’s fault.
Group chats are everywhere now, and what they offer is a kind of ambient company. Somewhere close by, people are talking, a little like a radio left on in the next room. It is pleasant. It is also easy to mistake for friendship. In a group of sixty, everyone is reachable and no one is responsible. An absence there never stands out. A silence does not look like someone missing; it looks like someone busy.
I do not want to be unfair to the phone. My closest friend from school moved to Guwahati in Class 10, and for six years we have kept going on voice notes, long rambling ones recorded on evening walks. That friendship lives almost entirely online, and it is as real as anything I have. But it lives in a chat of two.
So the line I keep drawing is less between the screen and the room than between the crowd and the pair. Friendship, it seems to me, needs someone whose business it is to notice you. What to do about this, I am less sure. On the fourth day I muted eleven groups, felt oddly guilty, and by evening had unmuted three of them.
The phrase ‘ambient company’, as used in the passage, refers to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → a faint sense of others nearby, none of them really attending to you
Ambient means present all around you, often without being noticed. So ambient company is the feeling that people are around, though none of them is really with you.
- The next line explains the phrase. People are talking “somewhere close by”, like “a radio left on in the next room”. You hear it, but it is not speaking to you.
- That is why nobody noticed the writer’s fever. The voices were there, but no one was paying attention to the writer. Example: The ambient noise of the traffic outside helped him fall asleep.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: a small circle of others chosen with care for their loyalty to you — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: A group can have sixty members, and no one in it is responsible for you. That is the opposite of a chosen, loyal circle.
Option 2: a lively gathering of others meeting face to face in one place — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: The company here comes through group chats on a phone. Nobody meets face to face.
Option 4: a weakening link with others who have since moved to distant cities — Incorrect. Wrong link: The friend who moved to Guwahati comes in the next paragraph. That friendship is strong, and it is not what “ambient company” describes.