Life Without A Mobile…

Almost always, certain things tend to happen when we dont want them to. For example, you will be very seriously talking to your friend on your mobile about important things like, what she was upto at that instant of time or whether she had her lunch or whether she was still hanging out with her latest boyfriend or whether she had ditched him. And exactly at that time, the landline rings. What will a sensible person do? Ignore it, but of course its optimism which turns into foolishness, to expect sensible outcomes here. We will answer the call, only to know that its a wrong number!

Thats just the way things are, i was told, when i asked about this to my friend (By the way, she was in a very dejected mood when i asked her about it, so the answer i guess). I had this collection of extracts and essays called ‘Words of Wisdom’ as my English text for my first year, and one of those extracts was ‘On Not Answering The Telephone’, by William Plomer. It was a very funny one in which he explains why he says ‘No’ to a telephone, and how he lives without it. The way he spoke about it, had me in a kind of anti-telephonic mood for a few days, and atlast I decided that I would try life without my mobile.

Making this decision was pretty easy of course, but living it? I decided to try. My point is, there are so many people without a mobile, and they look perfectly happy without having to worry whether their mobile model looks better then their friend’s, is their bluetooth working fine, and so on and so forth. So with this feeble fact in my mind, i thought i will bid farewell to my mobile at the end of this month, when my validity would expire, that is, May 30th.

But i guess, my fate and the Airtel fellows, had some other plans for me. Now, rewinding back to a few days, i had a message from Airtel, asking me whether i would like to choose an hello tune for my callers, and if yes, i should reply as Music and they would call me and let me select a song, whereupon my call charges would be saved. Now, if i had been sensible, i should have ignored that message, but living in Chennai and of course, being a citizen of India, i wanted to try it out not only because of the charge saving thing but also because i wanted to see whether they really will call back and immediately, found out that they did. I chose a song, quite a good one of course, and Rs.30 was charged for it with an additional Rs.15 rent for each month.

I quite forgot about this, as of course, i dont call myself and yesterday (13th May) i had a message from Airtel saying that my monthly rental charge for the hello tune has been taken. I checked my balance and found that it was an all time low, a negative value! I neither could call nor message anyone, and if i start talking about the disadvantages of Prepaid connection, that would go on and on forever. So, anyway, i decided that the time was ripe for the pre-planned mobile-ditching operation.

I topped up, and after the negative balance became positive, i was left with Rs.4.88, i informed all my friends about my decision and then, to use up that balance, called my friend. I not only wasted my balance, i wasted my time too. But then, certain things are destined to happen and we, mere humans, cant stop them.

And so, i said Goodbye to my faithful companion, took out the sim, and there started my experiment of a “Life without a cell phone”. The only bad thing about this is that, i had to give up my brand new LG mobile to my mom. Well, as i said, things not only tend to happen when we dont want them to, but they dont happen the way we want them to either.