K S S Pillai
When I visited a friend's house recently, most family members, including children, were busy with smartphones. It is the scene one comes across almost anywhere in the country. I felt like an intruder and left the place quickly after finishing my business. The house inmates also must have heaved a sigh of relief when I left.
The mobile phone is so commonplace that our maid comes with one over which she talks often. The fishmonger, the vegetable vendor, and the 'raddiwala' who visit our housing society daily are also never without one.
That reminds me of the period when mobile phones were not even heard of. As it is difficult for the young generation to believe, I have stopped telling them that there was such a time and that the landline phone was a box with a rotating dial. As getting a telephone connection was not easy, those who had those instruments kept them proudly at a prominent place in their sitting rooms.
Messages were usually conveyed through letters that took a long time to reach the destination, depending on the distance. All trains had a coach reserved for the mail, coated with red paint outside. Urgent messages like those about deaths were conveyed through telegrams.
I was amused to see a scene from an old film the other day where the female addressee of a telegram fell unconscious when told that there was a telegram about her son. She was convinced that the telegram meant her son was dead. She was pacified only when an English-knowing person read the telegram and said it was about the impending arrival of the son.
If urgent messages were to be conveyed from one office to another at a distant place, there was the 'trunk call'. It was a time-consuming affair, as one had to book the call with the post office, providing them with the telephone number of the recipient, and the connection was made after a long interval. The parties had to shout over the telephone, and all bystanders knew what message was sent. There used to be a joke that the parties had to shout so loudly that both could hear one another even without the telephone.
An incentive for the elected representatives was that they were allotted a certain quota of telephone connections they could use as they liked. It took years to get a connection after one applied. For an urgent connection, the party had to deposit Rs 15000, a princely sum.
When the situation eased a little, STD booths for local and long-distance calls were established. As the charges differed for different time slots, there would be crowds when the charges were less. When my younger son was a student of the Regional Engineering College (now NIT) at Trichy, we used to go to an STD booth after 11 at night to talk to him. First, he had to be informed at the hostel, and he would rush to the room where the telephone was kept.
Years later, mobile phones made their entry. The instrument was so costly that it was a status symbol, and even the security guards were so awed that they sometimes let the person talking over a mobile phone enter without the usual check!