Around six in the morning, in a small town in India, a 60-year-old man named Desh Raj Sharma picks up a phone he learned to use recently, searches for a rose with Good Morning laid over it in curling gold font, and sends it to more than fifty people. He does this every day. The teenagers in that family group either ignore or laugh at the activity because that is what you're supposed to do with a man like that and an image like that. Some version of him is in every family group I know.
I think the laughing is the mistake. The flower-and-sunrise JPEG, dew drops, folded-hands emoji, a Sanskrit blessing in a typeface no designer would approve, is the first folk art India's next several hundred million internet users have made for themselves. It's native to the medium and it's theirs. The people disrespecting it are doing class snobbery and calling it taste.
The contempt is older than the image
Be honest about who is disrespecting and who is being disrespected. The contempt for Good Morning forwards sorts by class and by language. It comes from English-speaking, metro-dwelling, college-educated people, and it lands on older relatives, on smaller towns, on the uncle in your family group who learned the internet at sixty instead of six. The gallery-full-of-roses complaint gets told as a joke at dinners; I've heard it more times than I can count. I've been guilty of it as well. What looks like bad taste from one chair looks, from another, like the only taste available to people who were never taught mine.
This has happened before, and not subtly. In the 1890s Raja Ravi Varma set up a printing press and produced cheap colour prints of gods and goddesses, oleographs, that ordinary people could afford and pin to their walls. The art establishment decided a serious painter had debased himself into kitsch. Calendar art was coined as an insult. A century later the prints are in museums, studied as the foundation of India's popular visual culture, and a Ravi Varma sells for around 167 crore rupees. The thing the educated found embarrassing turned out to be the thing that shaped how a billion people picture their own gods.
I'm not claiming the Good Morning JPEG is Ravi Varma. I'm claiming the reflex is identical. Cheap, mass-produced, devotional, sentimental, made for people without the cultural capital to know it's supposed to be embarrassing, and dismissed on exactly those grounds by the people who have that capital. Every time a culture invents a way for its poorest members to make and share images, the schooled members find it tacky. They have been wrong every time. I see no reason to assume this is the exception.
Whatsapp is enabling a medium
Look at what the Good Morning image actually is as an object. A greeting fused with a picture. In older village life you folded your hands and said a blessing to a neighbour; the blessing and the gesture were one thing, free, gone as soon as they were made. The digital version keeps the blessing and the gesture and adds a permanent, copyable image to carry them. Nobody designed this. It assembled itself out of whatever the medium provided (a camera roll, a forward button, a search box that returns a million roses) in the hands of people who had never been told what a JPEG was for.
That is what a folk medium is. Truck art on the back of a lorry, rangoli at a doorstep, the wedding card with the gold embossing and the Ganesha in the corner. No academy handed these down. They grew wherever ordinary people had a surface, a few tools, and a reason to decorate. The phone is the newest surface.
The reason, I'm thinking of you, it's morning, may your day go well, is one of the oldest there is.
What the rose is saying
The part the disrespect never reaches is what the forward is actually saying. Read it as a message instead of clutter and it says several things at once.
Attendance, first. Fifty roses before sunrise is a roll call. Still here and yours. A man whose working day ended years ago and whose children live in three cities has exactly one daily act that reaches all of them at once, and he performs it before any of them are awake. That is not a man defeated by technology. That is a man who worked out precisely what it's for.
Second, it's an invitation with the pressure taken out. A phone call demands twenty minutes and a reason, and a call at the wrong hour won't be picked. The rose asks for nothing. If nobody replies, nothing was lost and nobody's dignity is dented. It's the cheapest way ever invented to leave a door open.
Third, it carries what that generation was never taught to say out loud. Those households did not say I love you across the breakfast table; affection moved through acts, through food, through showing up. The rose is the same code on a new surface. A man who would be embarrassed to type I'm thinking of you has been sending it every morning for years, folded inside a flower, deniable again, and received exactly as intended. I know because I've been on the receiving end, and the day you work out what the flower is standing in for, the image stops being funny.
And if you make things for this country, read the image one more time, because it's also a record of what several hundred million people like and what they trust. The frame is full because in the world the image comes from, fullness is generosity; the same instinct that keeps refilling a guest's plate keeps filling the frame with flowers. The blessing is there because beauty is expected to wish you well, not just sit there being tasteful.
So here is what to do with the next one, and it isn't muting the group. Reply. Not a thumbs-up, not a sticker. Reply with some news. Parents love news. Good morning, Baba. We're thinking of buying a dishwasher this Diwali. Tell Ma she won't have to rinse everything before it goes in.
By doing this, you haven't returned a greeting; you've handed him a seat in a live family decision. He'll have opinions by lunch. Ma will refuse to let the machine anywhere near her steel. The group will argue about brands for a week, and the rose will still arrive the next morning, except now it means what it always meant, and you can finally read it.
The rose was never about the morning.