The mobile is bringing out the worst in us

We Indians are an ill-mannered, insecure, uncivilised and uncouth lot. I know this is a sweeping generalisation, and I apologise upfront to those who feel the definition doesn’t fit. But stereotypes hold shock value and carry within them the core of a larger truth.

Exhibit A is our mobile phone behaviour.

Why mobiles phones? Well, unlike the landline, the mobile has reached more than half the population, and it is not a fringe thing. It defines us in ways we don’t care to think.

For a start, let’s leave aside the obvious. Loud share price discussions with the broker inside crowded suburban trains, and piercing shrieks from an unsilenced mobile inside a movie hall are par for the course. It testifies to our abiding unconcern for how our behaviour impacts others. How we use the mobile, both when we call someone and when someone calls us, tells us a lot about who we are. Let’s discuss some situations.

You are in the midst of a board meeting and your phone rings with that Bollywood number you’ve set for your spouse. If you’re the boss, the rule that you should keep your handset in silent mode apparently does not apply. We thus establish our status as feudal lords. Lesser minions get dirty looks if their phone rings in the conference room.

But you’re boss only at the office. If you take the call, it establishes you as a marital wimp. If you don’t, the spouse is livid. If you take it, and the voice at the other end is in attack mode (“you left the fridge door open”, or “why didn’t you call aunt Lila on her birthday?”), your colleagues will see your face redden as your side of the conversation goes limp or apologetic.

With one call we have established several things. One is the caller’s insensitivity to your position. It also tells us something about the state of your marital relationship. Whether to take the call or not in the midst of a meeting is a decision fraught with anxiety and danger potential. Quite clearly, everyone’s breaking telephone etiquette and doesn’t care a damn.

Let’s analyse another call’s hidden psychological content. Your boss calls you at an ungodly hour to discuss something that he thinks is urgent. Most Indian businessmen believe that if they pay a decent wage, they own the employee. The very fact that the call comes at an indecent hour speaks volumes about the nature of the employer-employee relationship: it’s master-servant, not a contractual one between equals. The hidden message is: if I call at midnight, you had better pick it up, even if all I want to know is whether you will take my dog out for a walk the next day when I am out of town.

To avoid this kind of anxiety, employees often switch off their phones so that they can’t be disturbed in their personal time. They pretend their phones weren’t working when the boss called. The only way to parry the boss’ unwanted call is to become a consummate liar. We have become great liars because the mobile puts us in situations which we do not want to be in, and the nature of the employer-employee relationship is wrong. In the landline days, your boss couldn’t know if you were at home just because the phone rang. When you carry your mobile on your person, everyone knows you are avoiding a call. Or at least it is assumed to be so. This knowledge, instead of spurring us to think about how to respect each others’ privacy, brings out the worst in us.

A third way of analysing our national character is to look at how we use the SMS texting facility. Next month one is sure to receive 100 SMSs wishing me a happy Ganesh Chathurthi. It makes me happy that so many people thought about me when invoking Ganesha’s blessings. But is this really true? When we send the same SMS as unchanged bulk message to 100 people, what does it tell the receiver about us? That you are one among hundreds? That you are wishing him because it is easy to do so? Either way, it doesn’t do much good to either texter or receiver. But we still do it.
How we don’t use the SMS also tells us a lot about ourselves.

Most people in most situations can’t know where the called party is when the call reaches him or her. One could be in the loo, on a train, at a shopping counter, eating dinner, or sleeping. The polite thing to do is to send an SMS asking whether this is a good time to call. The SMS is the ideal way to establish good manners and sensitivity to the other person’s situation, but this is almost unlikely to happen in Indian situations. We are like that only.