The 'phoney' phones of today !! Huh !!

Getting really candid, I've spent the last two weeks in low spirits as I was extravagantly disquieted by an unpleasant incident which cunningly managed to divert the phenomenal energies of every neuron in my brain into a mammoth ocean of uselessness and futility. The unpleasant incident which I am talking about was a squabble I had with a darling, I emphasize, a 'darling' friend of mine. Perhaps 'squabble' is too exaggerated a word to be used !!. Honestly it was a heated exchange of not-so-pleasant messages between both of us about he reneging on his promise to call me back all the 3 consecutive times I placed a call to him.

Sounds downright trivial isn't it? May be it is.. may be it is not. I might sound horribly cliched but we as human beings tend to expect a lot of things from our loved ones. We expect them to take our calls even in the dead of the night and speak garrulously for hours about how devilish the new boss in the office is or how staggering the collections of Chiranjeevi's son's latest movie is or how torturous the traffic on the Punjagutta flyover in Hyderabad has become of late .

As is my quirk, I expect my friends to promptly reply to every message I simply forward sitting languorously on my bed cruelly dismissing off the criticality of the situation they are in. I want them to call me everday and discuss at length , the silliest of the topics carefully hand-picked from the trash. I feel seriously neglected and supremely distressed when they promise to call me and go back on their word and finally say apologetically that they had forgotten about it. I get so perturbed that the incident almost steers the normal happening of my day-to-day activities to a complete standstill. I have also realized that the graph of my expectations from people has sky-rocketed from the time I got myself the sinful cellphone and to an extent from the time I began using the internet.

The fact that the whole world is just a call or a message away has probably irreverisbly poisoned our minds that we have now begun to take people, their presence and their concern for granted. The very feeling that even the P.M. of India can be contacted by a dialling a petty 10-digited number on the mobile phone , the overweening pride of being able to chat with a friend seven oceans away at any time we fancy , has probably tutored us flawlessly on being so rude and egoistic that we can't digest the 'insult' of our calls going unnoticed or unanswered.

The repercussions of this tutored ego :

-> 'How could she not take my call when she knows that I generally call her at this time everyday?"


-> "Didn't notice that I called you yesterday? Nonsense!! How can the missed-call log not flash my number?"


-> "Ok.. I understand that you were busy and couldn't take my call, but how could you forget to call me back?"


-> "You said you'd call back and you didn't!! How cruel can you get? I am sure you have other friends who are more important than me."












The fireworks that went off between my friend and me were actually ignited by one of these accusations and honestly it was me who made it against my friend. Thankfully, we've sorted out our differences, apologized and have reconciled with each other. I am still so appalled that a phone call could attempt to drown us (we who never had a tiff over any issue till date) in turbulent waters.

But this incident gradually reminded me of my days in primary school when phones weren't that big a hit and were hardly used by people. I recollect that the only means of communication between people were still the plain inland letters and postcards. I vividly remember how my cousin Pratima used to send me letters on a monthly basis and how I used to jump and dance with sheer delight and impatiently snatch away the letter from my dad's hand and read it greedily over and over again in a vain attempt to satisfy my curiosity. I somehow can't forget the glimpses of my mom writing back letters to her close chums with enormous patience and enthusiasm












Though getting in touch with a loved one was an arduous task in those days, the value attached to that person was truly priceless !!!. The naive happiness we felt in receiving a letter from him/her in reply to the one we sent, was absolutely indescribable and too much for words. !!



Cellphones , could have axed the length of communication between people, but they have manifolded the probablity of misunderstandings between them as well. Cellphones have not only made us egoistic but also have bestowed us with liberties to lie and prevaricate, to feign and sham and to elude and escape. There is no dearth of instances when people claim to have forgotten to see the call history, or profess to be out of town or simply state to be extremely busy in a meeting. The worst part is that we have no option except to believe what they are saying. !!

















On the other hand, inland letters and postcards had pure, unadulterated love, affection, concern , enthusiasm and joy associated with them. We never felt offended when our people took their own sweet time to reply to our letters. Infact we enjoyed casting desperate glances at the postbox in our house all throughout the day supplicating God for a speedy reply from them. Though the wait was a little painful, the relief our souls got when we finally received the expected reply , completely nullified the pain we were experiencing. These late replies were innocently and comfortably attributed to postal delays and sometimes to an assumed busy schedule of our loved ones .














During these bygone days of letters and cards, there was excess of love and dearth of sham .. abundance of truth and scarcity of lies.. more of sharing and less of indicting , presence of perfect understanding and absence of misunderstandings .. a palace for humility and no room for ego..


But today the 'delivery report' of every sms you send and call log of every call you place makes your argument even stronger when the poor guy denies having received your message or call. Today's phone is horrendously wicked. It camouflages its ulterior motives of weakening relationships with a facade of glittering and sterling features. It has deceitfully made our prized people so easily accessible , that they have almost lost their importance.


If the value attached to a friend's reply was priceless those days, why is it worth a bauble today ? Which tide of technological advancement has washed away our naive innocence? Why are we left with the only option of enduring these phoney cell phones for the times to come?


P.S.:

-> Dedicated to my friend whom I had a tiff for the first time in 6 years. There is something I'd like to say to him : ' The more we start loving someone, the more we tend to fear losing them. It's a common human tendency coz we can't afford to lose a person chosen among millions.' (Courtesy by Anil :D ) I've controlled the strong desire to mention his name !!! :-)


-> I am over the moon about we demolishing the walls of misunderstandings which had emerged between us in a split of a second.

-> Occasional tiffs with your best friend are good. They are successful in drawing both of you closer to each other. :-)

-> My special thanks to Annapurna for sharing her commendable opinions and ideas with me. This post is an inspiration from one of them.