If you are part of a college or school girl friends WhatsApp group, you may quickly recognise the shape of Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives (FLBW). 

Such WhatsApp groups mirror conventional real-life groups. There are alphas who drive and dominate the dynamics. They enforce a nostalgia which covertly maintains old group hierarchies. They decide who will be fussed over or centralised and who will be iced out or scapegoated through sudden offence. Some silent, resentful sufferers neither leave nor wholeheartedly participate in the group. And then there’s an outlier--someone of the old group who is not in the WhatsApp group. That person might have been a freelance friend—a loner, non-belonger who partakes of many group friendships, without wholly belonging to one; a misfit who later becomes magnificent. Such people will at once be considered too good for the group, and also “who does she think she is” by the group. Yaniki, Shalini Passi.