Column

So there’s another addition to the cellphone family which does everything except wash your dishes and park your car. They call it the I-Phone! But this column could be a waste of your time if you are looking for information on I-Phone! Because, it’s expensive and I can’t afford it. Besides I’m having enough trouble with my existing cellphone and a MTNL landline, both of which have turned me into a lazy anti-social!

Damn Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone. Otherwise our lives would have been far simpler. Actually, the first fully intelligible telephone call occurred on March 6, 1876, when Bell in one room, called to his assistant in another room: “Come here, Watson, I want you.” But instead of Watson, Bell encountered an answering machine in the other room, “Sorry, Watson can’t take your call because he’s with Sherlock Holmes.”

This is precisely the problem with phones. You never get to speak to the person you want to. Either you speak to an answering machine (“Hi, I am not home!”) or a servant (“Saab bathroom mein hai!”) or a wrong number (“Who? Kaunsa number chahiye?”).

All these were problems Alexander Graham Bell had not accounted for. He was just happy that he could call up his friends without having to physically venture out of his house. He’d also not accounted for the frustration when the phone rings and you can’t hear anything. Like, I once had this old neighbour who used to pick up her phone the moment it rang and said, “Hello…Halo…Hallow… Hullooo!” It’s almost as if by the fourth hello she’s gone down the receiver looking for the caller. But talking to somebody without actually meeting that person is where the telephone forced us to become lazy. Because once we got tired of actually going from the kitchen to the bedroom to answer the phone, some lazy guy invented the cordless. Then we got more ambitious and wanted to carry the phone in our pocket. So Dr Martin Cooper devised the cellular phone, so that we could carry the phone to every conceivable place — from bathroom to bedroom and boardroom. And for the even lazier ones, who found the whole art of opening their mouth and talking too tiresome, God invented sms - short messaging service - which butchered the Queen’s language into a series of abbreviations. Like this:
“Red 2days col?”
“Yup. Utr rbbish.”
“Mst cl the writer. Do u hve hs num?”