Skip to main content

The Age Of Chatter Boxes

From Bakelite telephones to sleek BlackBerry the journey has been a flippant twenty years.
World has changed much, back then when the telephones were in dial mode, you can call that the Mumage- we talked less, surreptitiously and guiltily. Along the years Indians rapidly learnt to shed their guilt of enjoying themselves and did so with abandon. “Teacher we don’t need no self control” became the consumerist creed. Remember the time when “Talking” was considered a national waste- almost a crime during the dark years of the Emergency.


                                            Remember this picture: We two have two


 The hegemonic dictates “Talk Less Work More” and “We Two Have Two” were pasted on the sides of buses, on the derriere of lorries, on signs all over the country. It had filled the Indian mind with a foreboding sense of hushed fear. And then a couple of decades later came the riot of excessiveness of the cell phone era with their luring “Talk More On Free Time” and “Free Talk” repeated in almost the same odious style of the infamous regime- plastering them on billboards and buses to colonize minds into endless inane jabbering. Well they succeeded- we are now in the age of constant communicating Jabberkhans: tell me if this breed can live without talking, SMSing or mailing inanities? Not anymore. It's Bol India Bol

                                                       *   *    *     *
Looking back was it just twenty years ago that to make a phone call, we hostel inmates of St.Teresa’s College, Kochi had to beg and plead with the nuns. It was a period when the Rotary Dialing of the Indian Telecommunication System had yet to be replaced by the simple Push Button system. And the nuns of St.Teresa’s College considered the telephone a sacred instrument. So sacred, it required a Phone Guardian Angel, who put a lock in the holes of the 1 and 2 numbers of the finger wheel. The lock acted as an impediment and rendered it impossible to dial the numbers. Importantly, she strung the cold steel key on a chain and hung it around her neck; the key snuggled and sighed in the warmth of her deep valley.                                                             *    *     *     *



The telephone, a black crude bakelite instrument that belonged to the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India was placed in a hole in the wall. The Phone Angel, a young sixteen year old, with a squeaky voice was assigned no other work but to vigilantly guard the phone from seven in the morning till the commencement of classes and then again from four in the evening till bedtime. No one touched the finger dial, if anyone wished to make a call, the Phone Angel dialed the number before handing the receiver to the caller, collected the money, carefully wrote down the name and number in the logbook.
                                                        

                                                         *      *      *      *
     Calls to boyfriends meant trouble, big trouble. So boys incestuously called the hostel inmates, beautiful young girls, in the guise of father, brother and cousin. And the nuns kept tab on the outgoing calls and the entries that got more frequent were checked against numbers given by guardians. Numbers that didn’t correspond, they knew were fraught with dangerous signals and immediately the guardian was informed of the caller’s behaviour and the very important phone number like a precious jewel was handed to them on a slip of paper. The nuns thought this system of peeking into the minds of young girls was absolutely foolproof, the heartbeats of the girls were well under their control.
                                                          *    *     *      *

Little did they know, young girls hopelessly in love would do anything to speak to their male friends. Those innocent young things were phone- tapping experts, who knew more about phones than the nuns. Unknown to the nuns, though the finger wheel of the phone was locked, the rotary dial telephone used the pulse dialing system, this worked by the telephone getting disconnected at specific intervals when the number was dialed. So one didn’t need to use the finger wheel, one had to just tap on the hook switch once for number 1, the telephone disconnected once and twice for number 2 and the telephone disconnected twice and so on and ten times for 0 and pause between the numbers.
Got that?

                                                           *     *      *     *
                                 
Those days, young sweethearts may not have been on the Blackberry 24* 7 but the thrill of giving the Phone Angel the slip and tapping the phone accelerated the heartbeats to feverish speeds like no Blackberry can.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: An Autobiography Of A Sex Worker by Nalini Jameela

I am 51 years old. And I would like to continue to be a sex worker.” This is how the candid and defiant opening statement in Nalini Jameela’s autobiography in Malayalam, Oru Lymgika-thozhilaliyude Atmakadha, goes. It at once throws a challenge at society’s double standards — harsh on prostitutes and soft on the clients. Nalini Jameela, who is the coordinator of the Kerala Sex Workers’ Forum, reveals her sordid story with no trace of compunction. Nalini was a 24-year-old widow when she entered the profession to feed her two children. At that time she did not think about the repercussions of her act. She writes, “I was earning Rs 4.50 at a tile factory near Trissur. My mother-in-law served me with an ultimatum to either give her five rupees a day to look after my children or leave the house. I recounted my woes to a friend, who introduced me to Rosechechi. Rosechechi promised me Rs 50 if I spent time with a man. The first thought that came to my mind was that my children would be looked

Kochi Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

London-based artist Hew Locke was in for a bit of shocker when he reached the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 site, Fort Kochi in Kerala. His installation,  Sea Power , was apparently crafted from his imagination of what the historical kingdom of Cochin would have been. Indeed, he had yoked his imagination to that of a 17th century German printmaker. The printmaker had in turn conceived the kingdom of Cochin based on the tales of another. “My work is imagination based on the imagination of an image that was perhaps real. It was double fiction and I thought the prints were elaborate romantic imagery...but I discovered when I arrived in Cochin that this double fiction has elements of reality. People still wear lungis and walk around bare-chested,” says an amazed Locke. Hew Locke’s beaded frieze of mythological and historical figures that gently sway in the wind is a response to the biennial theme, ‘Whorled Exploration’, and suggests blips in the seminal mov­ements of history. Whorled Exp

SnooTea: Just My Style

(Photographs by Minu Ittyipe) It began on a lark to spiff up my morning cuppa. Oh well, I just wanted a change from what I had been drinking all my life. I am not complaining about the faithful brew that I stir up with tea dust, it does merrily improve with two extra spoonfuls of sugar but I was just plain bored with the regular. My concept of a cup of tea was corralled in the traditional Indian style- coppery coloured liquid topped with plenty of milk and sugar but now there was in me this undeniable thirst for a more delicate bouquet. Tranquilitea, Coonoor Curiously, though grown in our own backyard, few of us have heard of the orthodox leaf tea, forget the Silver Tips, Golden Tips and the White Tea etc.. that quietly find their way to the export market. To make a foray into this relatively unknown terrain, I headed for Tranquilitea, a tea lounge in the Nilgiris, for a cup of “Tippy” tea. On a sober note, you are cautioned not to confuse “Tippy” with the more commonplace “Tipsy” for