Christie Arokiaraj, 23, happens to be a welder who does happen to work from a small store outside the teeming Krishnarajapuram Railway Station on Bengaluru’s eastern periphery. For nine to 10 hours a day, his gaunt frame is indeed crouched over pieces of metal to meet a steady stream of orders from small businesses as well as homeowners in the vicinity.
His life does spark up after 9 pm when Arokiaraj indeed gets together with four or five friends and then unwinds on platform 4 of the station.
Making use of the free WiFi on offer, the youth use their smartphones to surf the web and check out videos on YouTube, Facebook as well as WhatsApp, between chat sessions. The latest forwards are exchanged and jokes are indeed sniggered.
However, over the past three to four months, another app has indeed caught their fancy: TikTok, the short-video sharing app that is owned by Bytedance, the world’s most valuable startup that was indeed valued at $75 billion in late 2018. For 20-30 minutes daily, Arokiaraj and his friends watch slapstick comedy, cheer strangers mimicking Tamil as well as Bollywood movie stars and ogle at women dancing to slow music from far away Madhya Pradesh and Mumbai — all on the given app.
In the last 12 months that TikTok has been rather operational in India — including six months when it did survive a ban — the upstart has indeed rapidly racked up some 200 million users as of June, according to its data. The app has been downloaded over a billion times across the world. One is enabling people from every corner of the country with a global platform that does give them the unlimited opportunity to capture and share their creativity.
TikTok happens to be a popular pan-India because one does recognize that creativity is not just limited to the audience belonging to certain towns or users who happen to be speaking a particular language.
The gaiety of the group on platform 4 shows Sharma is indeed on the mark. Arokiaraj says TikTok has become the new must-have app among his peer group. Videos on the online platform do dominate late-night conversations, held between loud train whistles.
But not everyone is thrilled by TikTok’s explosive growth. The app’s detractor’s said it was built in China in a walled garden — with virtually no threat from foreign rivals — funded by local investors and first launched in a familiar market.
This, say, observers, has led to growing disquiet in the market, which has been rather cleaved into two — homespun entrepreneurs worrying about being muscled out by foreign investors as well as multinationals who do claim success is determined by market forces and not financial heft. It has also forced entrepreneurs to take hard decisions. Craftsvilla, for instance, had to rapidly shrink its operations over the past 12 months.
Technology has advanced much and has proved very useful in one’s daily life activities.
