Telephone (Photo credit: plenty.r.)

While growing up the only phone I knew was the one my friend Mona and I had strung up between our two balconies. Actually our balconies were close enough for us to talk to each other without shouting too much, but a science project which involved talking over two strung together paper cups got us excited beyond belief. So we spoke to each other for a bit over our home made telephone till the next science project caught our fancy.

With a moribund economy strongly influenced by the Soviets, telephones in India were symbols of power and luxury. Apart from people in power and position, only the rich and famous had them. By the time I grew into adulthood, my father had become powerful enough to warrant a telephone so we had a government issue instrument and a connection which was tenuous at best so we spent the major part of the conversation asking the person at the other end if he could hear us!

Then in the 80s the government had a scheme  (TATKAL) whereby you could get a phone by paying a sum of money to jump the queue. This was all very official and completely above board. So for a princely sum of Rs. 30,000 ( which I may add was quite astronomical those days) you could get a new connection  in 10 days after verifying your need to get one immediately rather than wait your turn which could take as long as a year or two!

In what truly seems revolutionary time, telephones evolved into  the cordless instrument which Nimish Shah the Accounts tutor used to call the “walking phone”. Considering that most people used the instrument while pacing up and down, he was wrong to do so. However, the real evolution came with the MOBILE phone.

Hubby dear was one of the first people I know who actually had a big black, bulky instrument, a shade better than the walkie talkies used by our police and other people who needed to control things remotely. The early mobile phone was a dinosaur in comparison  to today’s slick models. And it too was an indication of one’s power and importance.

As the models got slimmer, the colours zanier and the features more complicated  phones started doubling up as cameras, radios and even as mini internet cafes. With every new innovation, the price zoomed up and it ultimately became such a status symbol that one had to literally by one every other month especially when every tradesman and his Uncle had one.

Because of my early years of phone deprivation, I have a phobia for phones and consider them a gross violation of my privacy. Why do I have to be available at the other end of the line? At all times and for all people? Including the pesky wrong numbers? So for several years I stubbornly refused to get a phone till one of my children cast hers off in my direction. I of course insisted on getting the cheapest model largely because I had a camera to take photos, didn’t listen to the radio except when I was driving and had deep faith in my computer to connect me to the virual world. Besides not being a teenager, a working woman or a celebrity, I only needed the phone to call up the children to keep tabs on their whereabouts and figure out where they were by listening to background sounds, call up various tradesmen to enquire about certain services/products and most of all to call the driver when out shopping. In fact, he is #1 on my Speed Dial.

So most of my phones have been cast off models courtesy the children who wouldn’t be caught dead with anything older than last week’s model. However, every phone has a life and last week just when I was about to get a new one, it fell out of my pocket. I realised this while we were on our way home in a bumpy auto rickshaw and my ever thrifty mother thought we should go back and look for it. But where? On the road? In the shop?

I dropped the idea, preferring to go home and make a complaint to the service provider. Now my telephone connection is an adjunct of Hubby Dear’s so technically I need his every clearance to make a complaint regarding my phone. The next best option was to verify my identity and pass the security test. For some strange reason, the Service Providers have recorded the wrong date of birth and we always have a big fight over this. Luckily this time though they listened to my request for cancelling the subscription and within half an hour of losing the phone, my SIM card was de-activated.

For two days I was blissfully disconnected from the world and would have happily preferred it that way but for the fact that I wouldn’t be able to Speed Dial the Driver when I went shopping for vegetables. So Hubby Dear took me more than readily to the Vodafone office where I was given a new SIM card within minutes! And for free!

But that still didn’t solve my problem of being connected with the world. Most of my numbers were on the phone memory and not on the SIM. This meant that I had to actually physically find out all the phone numbers of my contacts and fill them in. So this morning while the rest of the world was sleeping, I looked up the old telephone directory. It was depressing to say the least . Half of the numbers were of people who were no longer in my life. Many were dead, many had out grown their purpose ( tuition teachers, children’s school friends, paediatricians, party organisers, ) while many numbers had changed.

Is this a sign  for me to move on? To forget the people from my past and to fill my phone with numbers of Suicide Help lines, Ambulances, Last Rite Providers, Old Age homes and other such depressing information?