Playmates

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Young people in China are reportedly hopping on to a new trend called dazi. Dazi, which means side by side, involves using lifestyle platforms like Xiaohongshu, to find activity partners, or folks with whom to pursue shared interests. It could be pursuing a cuisine, or going to comic-book events. Dazi is not the search for lasting friendship. You could think of it as the hook-up culture of friendship.

Whatever happened to making friends the old fashioned way, one might say.

Well, people often became friends the "old fashioned way" by sharing interests, humour and language common in their class. Their class determined what schools and colleges and then workplaces they were in and whom they met - or outcasted. Social journeys are themselves an algorithm, pushing us towards "people like us".

Love and friendship sometimes also game that social algorithm. A friend, a connection formed outside the predetermined paths, helps you discover a possible interest, world-view or network. The shared pleasures of company - sometimes called buri sangat - makes new adventure seem more possible. A small but significant number of such people in each generation shift the contours of our social worlds.

The internet altered some social possibilities by disrupting how people met. People in chat rooms had no pictures and used imaginary and imaginative handles. Many experiences that were marginalised or stigmatised by mainstream social norms found room online. Queer people, people in loveless marriages seeking connection, single women seeking romance and sexual adventure, not matrimony - these were some of the people left out of mainstream sociality who thrived on an internet so suited to the so-called weird and misfit. Their loneliness left them emotionally underprivileged.

At the time to meet someone online was viewed by many as sleazy or for losers. People who could not connect the "old-fashioned" way, yaniki like those who found social connection easy. But those "sleazoids" and "losers" made the new social space of the internet. Connecting, playing together in a playground of their own, brought confidence, self-acceptance and an everyday creativity which altered visible social life and laid the cultural foundations for social media.

At first social media was childlike fun. You "friended" each other without commitment, played silly games online, poking and vampire slaying, chatting and sharing for a while everyday.

Now, the internet is almost the only social space there is for many, reducing the meaning of life into quick takeaways and pre-decided relationship modes. And friendship itself is sometimes overloaded with political significance, pressed into radical meanings, when in fact its radicalism lies in its open-ended self-defining quality. In the older fashioned way, you played with many but became friends with a few. Some became friendships, other work partnerships, some just changed us with a chance encounter and then passed by.Those many shallow but fun connections contributed to our well-being. For a generation of only children, what might it mean to find playmates? What new paths might it lead them down which rearrange our currently disconnected social lives? What new worlds do we build when we play together?

Capitalism organises our social life by identity. While seeming to acknowledge us, it also boxes us and homogenises our possibilities and creates a new loneliness, our world's currently widespread affliction. Fun, pleasure, human connection disrupt those organised lines, through their unpredictability. In the search for connection, is a secret sauce for liberation. So here's to playmates.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com