Life Without A Mobile…
May 14, 2007
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.
May 14, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Life without a mobile will be a great !(Experience) But however we do have “The Internet” with Google thus you are still connected to the whole world , thus a mere phone wouldn’t matter much! except for the portability!
May 14, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Offtopic, Mr. William Plomer’s gonna get it from me ..
Back on topic, it isn’t impossible to disable a service now is it? You could have just asked someone the code to do so.
I have a pretty old phone myself and yet I look at others just to see what more it has and how helpful it gets with those things, and of course, I never worry about things like malfunctions cause they hardly occur in my eyes (and hands?). I am happy with it and happy without it too cause am not one of those who sticks to it all day forwarding crap and calling up to inquire if the person bathe or not.
Personally, even though I hate to carry the 130 g brick around in my pockets, keeping in mind to lock it before I slip it in and other silly things like that, it does save me a lot of trouble of walking to the next PCO or the sort and waiting in queues or popping in coins and the ordeal of remembering contact numbers. 40 of them. I’d define it as a good invention, except for the few cons like forwards and stuff I hope sensible people don’t do. At least not for all sort of messages.
(Don’t get me started on the tongue used .. )
What I want to point out is, unless it was pure addiction that you felt towards your mobile, this move was completely unnecessary. You have lived 15 years without mobile right? Thats a luxury most kids today don’t get. So why stop it? And why stop it early when the offer someone gave was still up and still is?
Being the kind of person you usually are, I know you won’t back off from it, not in a couple of months at least. So I hope whatever decision turns out after this, its something more reasonable than just what you say here. Hope you get your perspective on this right and set mine too if, in any case, am wrong. And no, no puns were inclined on perspective.
P.s. – Liked the post’s content and personal depth a lot. Editing needs a little attention .. hints being the “i”’s. But of course, I guess the Shift button sure is uncomfortable to hit upon. Again no puns please.
May 15, 2007 at 4:56 am
Well, whatever you say, am sure am not gonna use a mobile for two months at the least, and as Jayahari says, I still have the net (though it does malfunction at times, but little things like that are not going to stop me), and a mere phone wouldn’t matter much….
May 15, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Assuming your connection to be Airtel Broadband , the most of the malfunction is caused only due to DNS – switch to opendns http://www.opendns.com .
May 16, 2007 at 11:08 am
Yeah, it is an Airtel Broadband connection, thank you, will check it out
May 16, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Uh no .. It isn’t a DNS issue. DNS doesn’t lead to the disconnections you are experiencing. OpenDNS is good however, but its an infection trace that’s your issue here. Don’t bother unless you figured it out already, cause you’ll only get into more troubles messing things you don’t know about yet .. Especially fooling around with network settings.
Um and .. sorry for the jargon
Yet let me try to explain what a DNS is?
DNS stands for Domain Name Server. The domain names you enter actually point to a normal xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Ex. 127.0.0.1) IP address over the internet. So when you enter a site name, say http://www.purple.com into the browser, it connects to your Airtel’s DN-Server which reads the name “Purple.com” and points your browser to the IP address so that you can reach its server and thus, view the page you wish to.
Wait .. was this really needed? No! Sorry
May 17, 2007 at 5:01 am
Hehe, thanks anyway
May 17, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Whats the big fun in throwing away the mobile phone and grabbing it back after a month or two? Instead, a more sensible thing to do would be to curb/control its usage! After all, a mobile phone is a very handy thing of high utility value. And you should put it to good use! (Learn from me!)
May 18, 2007 at 6:04 am
I thought I heard you saying that even you had this idea of not using your mobile for two to three months a few years back. You lived without it, found it hard to do so, and got back to it… So, let me try that out now, and I wont budge off from this decision, I learnt this from you
April 15, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Spam
July 11, 2009 at 12:59 am
He put his eye to the hole. He just managed to spy some people sitting in deckchairs chanting, before a finger came out of nowhere and poked him in the eye. As he staggered back, the people started chanting, “Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen…”
August 1, 2009 at 12:34 am
Wow such an unexpected erosion! The predominantly earth stood unruffled to put goodbuy to Michael! He is Elvis of our days!R.I.P MICHAEL!