Google researchers in Silicon Valley were trying to figure out why so many smartphones were freezing up half a world away. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space on their phones daily.
The answer? Two words. “Good Morning!”
The glitch, Google discovered, was an overabundance of sun-dappled flowers, adorable toddlers, birds and sunsets sent along with a cheery message.
Millions of Indians are getting online for the first time—and they are filling up the internet. Many like nothing better than to begin the day by sending greetings from their phones. Starting before sunrise and reaching a crescendo before 8 a.m., internet newbies post millions of good-morning images to friends, family and strangers.
All that good cheer is driving a 10-fold increase in the number of Google searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years. Pinterest, the San Francisco visual-search platform, added a new section to display images with quotes. It saw a ninefold increase over the past year in the number of people in India downloading such pictures.
Good morning, sirs. Please have a refreshing nimbu pani before your walk to the fields. I must now go read for the test I am giving later. Have a good day and keep mother’s thoughts in your mind. Namaste.
the word urgent it pretty much like punctuation for Indians. The other one I find funny is the “for the same” thing. why does that get added to the end of sentences.
The way they behave online in general is just very foreign to me. We’ve obviously had some experience with it here, but every forum I’ve been on has had similar issues. It’s not that they’re not nice. Most seem to be overly polite, actually. It’s the spamming I don’t understand. They seem completely fine with starting dozens of threads a day, replying to ever thread multiple times, and just being all over the place in general.
Its a very extroverted culture. I’ve heard that in india in a lot of the cities, people just honk their horns incessantly. Not necessarily because they need to, just because they can. Reminds me of this.
yeah the use of horns is insane. but it is more of a “hey i’m here” function from what i could tell. since everything is so chaotic it helps to know where things are even if you can’t see