by Vani Viswanathan
[box]Since when did we become mobile phone freaks? Vani Viswanathan chronicles the journey that a typical currently 20-something-year-old in India would have been through with mobile phones.[/box]Have you ever noticed how lately, every time you have nothing to do, you have tended to whip out your mobile phone and check something on it? If you’re among the cooler ones with smart phones, you’d probably be checking your email or (more likely) checking Facebook. If you’re the more usual kind, you’d be getting the sudden urge to see what people have said to you in their SMSs, or you’ll suddenly miss your friends and start looking through your image gallery to see them and remember your happy times. If you’re the really social types, you’d probably be sending an email or an SMS, and you’d be so lucky that you’d actually receive a reply from the equally mobile friend of yours.
You’re not alone.
Yes, officially, we’re all freaks.
If you’re above 20, you’d likely have spent at least two hours every day as a teenager speaking to your best friend who sits either right next to you, right behind you or right in front of you in school, continuing on the tales you started while at school, and then talking about the math lesson that you couldn’t remember anything of as you were dozing off. If you were lucky, you’d have had a cordless phone, but otherwise you’d probably just have balled up in the corner of the room that had the phone, cautiously dropping your voice as parents or annoying siblings came in the way.
Mobile phones were just beginning to be seen and were cool, but you didn’t really pay them much attention because they were just unnecessary. Your uncles carried mobile phones that were nearly as big as cordless phones and had an antenna. There were hardly any cellular phone service providers, the only one that the author knew of, having grown up in south India, being RPG (long before it was renamed Aircel).
But things started changing. Your neighbour comes home with a cellular phone and you are awed at the size of it. It is only slightly thinner than a walkman, but you can actually make calls on it. And no fussy antennae or walkie-talkie lookalikes. It was extremely cool, and you could even have songs as your ringing tones, rather than the usual tring trings. Within months, all that you and your friends could discuss were the awesome ringtones you’d heard that they hadn’t.
And then suddenly getting a mobile phone was simply unavoidable. Discussing the available plans – why Airtel was better or Hutch rocked; missed calls and frequent ‘No balance’ SMSs; crazy levels of texting till thumbs went sore; unbearably frequent photo taking and uploading on Orkut – these were what life was about.
As sturdy Nokias slowly started getting replaced by regional and local models, and a profusion of service providers ranging from Virgin to Idea to Spice came up, there was no better chance for the roadside Romeo to add some style to his flirting. Be it hiking the volume of appropriate love songs on radio, or taking photos of themselves on their bikes, or speaking on hands free, they would do it all to woo the girl who was, in the meantime, busy texting her girlfriend furiously, giving by-the-minute updates of Romeo’s antics.
We have come a long way. Today, pretty much every email you get from someone in India has a line that describes their proud, advanced status: ‘Sent on my Blackberry from Vodafone’ or ‘Sent from my Nokia phone.’ People have the latest Nokia N’n’s or E’n’s. The auto driver asks you to give him a missed call so he knows when to come and pick you up. The lady selling strings of flowers attends a call while you inspect the quality of the jasmine in the strings. Aunties carry cell phones that come to life every now and then singing the Kanda Shashti Kavasam or a popular Carnatic music tone.
Forget these. You know things have taken a definite, massive and outrageously funny turn when your 90-year-old grandfather uses his dual-SIM, QWERTY keyboard and mp3 player enabled cell phone to call the priest of the temple for more details about the upcoming pooja for the new moon.
Pic : Swami Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/araswami/
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