That thing in your ear...

The mobile (or cell phone, have it your way) has spread like wildfire all over this country since 2000. The newspapers inform me that India has now emerged as the second biggest cell phone-using country in the world, having recently surpassed the US (given the population it was, of course, only a matter of time, some will say!), and at the speed with which it is growing, it may soon overtake China. It generally sounds good when you hear your country is tops in something, but is this one a dubious distinction or what?

At first (only about ten years ago, actually, but for today’s young that’s prehistoric times…) cell phones were very expensive and pretty useless (you could hardly get a connection), so they were (predictably) flaunted as status symbols by that tiny class of people who have too much money and no idea of what they can do with it (and would die if you suggested charity, or even buying good books). Then connections improved dramatically and prices fell through the floor (the set that cost Rs. 25,000 in 1998 would go for Rs. 1,500 today and won’t find buyers, it’s so out-of-date), and it could hardly serve as a status symbol any longer, seeing that every maidservant and railway coolie and rickshawwallah had one – but it happened so fast that the hip and happening crowd couldn’t give up the habit of carrying around their phones in their hands fast enough (ever wondered why people need to carry their mobiles tightly clasped in their hands or hanging from their necks as though it were a lifeline or something? I have been using one for six years now, and it has never been a bother hiding in my trouser pocket!)… and of course, a few phone makers are doggedly trying to keep prices up by advertising their gizmos as must-haves by getting them endorsed by celebrities and bedecked with diamonds and scented with rare perfumes and what have you. But a wag has already suggested that pretty soon the real status symbol will be not carrying a cellphone for all to see (and folks like me will at last heave a sigh of relief)… ‘Look, I don’t do what the riffraff does’!

But what are so many people doing with so many mobiles? The advertisements seem to suggest that you can’t even express to your loved ones how much you love them any longer if you don’t call or message them: just sitting down beside them and telling them face to face or giving them a hug or a kiss has become so passé, so uncool! I can see boyfriend and girlfriend by the score sitting on roadside culverts, engrossed in punching keys on their separate mobiles. Scientists have observed that after a million years of practising the use of the index finger, which supposedly separated us from the apes like nothing else, we have been persuaded by the cell phone in two decades flat to make the thumb the most-used of fingers, and I have grown so visually used to people with mobiles stuck to their ears that I actually started on seeing a man passing by merely scratching his ear instead of talking (or listening) on a phone: surely such people should be put in museums?

Stories of people being so engrossed in phoning that they are run over by cars and trains no longer raise eyebrows, and watching a man taking instructions from his wife on the mobile about what to shop for at the vegetable market made me wonder how we and our fathers coped without these gadgets for so long. Soon, they say, you won’t be able to drive without the aid of your GPS-enabled mobile. Listening to people’s choice of ringtones gives away more about their personalities than they would ever care to admit: my girls snigger about what they hear when their teachers’ mobiles suddenly go off in class. Mobiles are already offering radio, camera, email, TV and canned music in addition to phone and messaging facilities: how much longer before they start wiggling appendages and giving you services of a more intimate sort, and people gladly give up jobs and spouses before they part with their mobiles?