The recently deceased theorist Fredric Jameson’s complaint with what he calls ‘third-world literature’, that is English writing from the Global South, was that they were national allegories. Aijaz Ahmed famously critiqued Jameson for his elitist, de-historicized view of global space and writing from the Global South. Jameson must have made a sweeping oversimplification based on Rushdie’s seminal postcolonial novel, Midnight’s Children and some others which followed it. In spite of what Jameson said, it is a fact that the Indian English novel has long back overcome the Jamesonian constriction and become a form of signification of the way of life.
‘What’s up?’, meaning, ‘How are you?’ or ‘What news?’, is an informal way of greeting. It might also suggest human curiosity to know things, especially the new developments or news of others. What social media thrives on is perhaps primarily this craving of humans to know of others and about them, for which we use the term ‘being connected’ too. But the novel under discussion is not about the connections that social media makes but about the discord; the building of an echo chamber and consequent vigilante violence.