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 writer’s remark that in a group of sixty ‘everyone is reachable and no one is responsible’ implies that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → in a big chat, each member leaves it to others to notice someone who goes quiet
In a big group anyone can send you a message, but no one feels it is their duty to check on you.
- Reachable means easy to contact. Everyone in the group can be reached in a second.
- But “no one is responsible”. With sixty people, each person thinks someone else will notice.
- The next lines say the same thing. An absence there “never stands out”. A silence just “looks like someone busy”.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: large groups are poorly run because no single member is chosen to look after them — Incorrect. Misread: This takes “responsible” to mean the person who runs the group. The writer means no one feels a duty to notice a missing member.
Option 3: members of large groups avoid replying to messages because they fear being judged by many — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage says nothing about fear of being judged. The groups send four hundred messages a day.
Option 4: the writer blames the classmates in the group for not visiting during the fever — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer says the silence “was nobody’s fault”.