Me, Myself and My Mobile Phone……

This blog is about my experiences and views about my mobile phone. It travels with me wherever I go. To temples, to hospitals, to places where silence matters more, to mortuary, to graveyard, and so on… even to places where there is no network coverage.

Basically I am a tech junkie who tries to use any technology that has reached the market, but technological advancements in mobile phones have never been my cup of tea. To me they are communicating devices and that’s all. I don’t even know the model numbers and when someone asked my about the features of the mobile phone which I had then, I just blinked and he starred at me like seeing an uninvited guest in someone else’s party.

My Operations with my mobile phone are very limited, I make a call, I attend a call, I store numbers in phone book, change the mode to silent in situations that demands it and activate the alarm every day before going to bed. I neither send nor forward messages. But I read them.

I lost my cell phone one day. I was panic as if Obama is waiting to make a call to me and to discuss about the Iraq war. My mind populated the following questions: How many calls will I get? Who are the probable callers? What will they think if nobody is picking it up? Who will find it out? If it goes to the hands of a malicious person, what he will do? Where I will be if he does something illegal with it? And so on……. All of sudden one of my colleagues found that in a bush near Tamil Department. Thank God! My invaluable asset is back.

Five six years before, when I leave the home in the morning, my mom reminds me to take my lunch bag and nowadays she reminds me to take my mobile phone. Have they become the sixth finger in everyone’s hands? Of course it helps me a lot when I call her to say “I am not going to come home today for dinner”, but do they play such a pivotal role in our life? For many their cell phone numbers have become their surname. If Kambar is alive now, he would have wrote, “அண்ணலும் நோக்கியா, அவளும் நோக்கியா”.

I saw a girl in train one day with new mobile phone. That phone I think is her task master and it gave many instructions to her. She was fiddling with the settings and configuration. She was “testing” the built in ringtones and few downloaded ones. One old woman who sat near her was already ill and got irritated. I was in some sort of confusion then. Who is ill?

I receive phone calls from my network operator about caller tunes at awkward situations. One day I received a similar call when I was waiting outside the mortuary to collect my friend’s brother’s body. I thought of breaking my mobile into pieces. When I was performing the 10th day rituals to my aunt with deep pain in the heart which I can’t describe in words, I received a call from a bank and the girl who spoke at the other end said that I am one of the luckiest customer of that month and they were keen to offer a loan with reduced interest if I need one.

In January 2005, on what was presumably a slow weekend for news, The Observer newspaper delivered its readers an astonishing scoop. Mobile phones, it announced, were responsible for the decline of the bird’s population. They are also creating adverse effects to health and in Chennai, many people who died in electric train accidents were hit when they were using their mobile phone.

Leave them apart; these phones have made many Harichandrans as Liars. If James Bond is licensed to Kill, you are licensed to Lie if you have a cell phone. Had Harichandra been alive now and has a mobile phone, It would be interesting to see if he can be as “True” as described in the stories. Instead of testing him with various cumbersome circumstances, "Vishwamithara" should make him a sales manger in an FMCG firm or Banking and Financial Domain. Being a person who is responsible for sales and with a mobile phone, I wonder can he escape without saying a lie?

With the advent of technology, communications has been faster, easier and simple. They have made life easy and mobile phones are definitely helping the rural people during crisis. Technology is a double edged weapon and hence cyber crimes too are increasing like anything. Camera mobiles have invaded into everyone’s privacy and many doesn’t find exchanging pornographic stuff as a criminal thing.

Despite all these unconstructive things, I still keep a mobile phone and I will, just for a call on Sunday afternoons from my niece who shouts “Hi Chittappu!”. Such wonderful moments makes me forget all the issues I have narrated so far and my life too goes on with mobile phones as an indispensable entity to it.