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.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
(A) The writer does not regard a friendship kept up mainly through a phone as a lesser one.
(B) The writer holds the hostel classmates to blame for not noticing the illness.
(C) The writer and the school friend have kept their friendship going largely through recorded messages.
(D) By the end, the writer has decided to leave most of the groups for good.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → (A) and (C) only
Each statement is checked against the passage.
(A) The writer does not regard a friendship kept up mainly through a phone as a lesser one. — Correct.
- The friendship with the school friend “lives almost entirely online”.
- The writer says it is “as real as anything I have”.
(B) The writer holds the hostel classmates to blame for not noticing the illness. — Incorrect.
- The writer says that nobody noticing “was nobody’s fault”.
(C) The writer and the school friend have kept their friendship going largely through recorded messages. — Correct.
- For six years they “have kept going on voice notes”.
- Voice notes are recorded messages.
(D) By the end, the writer has decided to leave most of the groups for good. — Incorrect.
- The writer only muted eleven of thirty-odd groups and “unmuted three of them”.
- The writer is also “less sure” what to do.