Phone Stalkers

Remember the time when telephones were considered a luxury ? When there was an 8 year waiting period for the telephone connection? Those were the days when the communication needs of the entire upper middle class neighbourhood I grew up in were well taken care of by 4 phone owning households and one public phone at the street corner.

We have come a long way since then baby.

Today, between 2 adults, 2 kids and the domestic help, we have 5 phones in the house and at any given point in time, one of them is ringing. The ring tone is no longer the simple ‘tring tring’. Mine resonates to the tune of ‘Hakuna Matata’ as that’s what pleases my 3 year old. The domestic help has a different Hindi song for each category of caller -my knowledge of Hindi songs has widened thanks to her constantly ringing phone. Many a time I have been caught humming along with it. The telephone is the single greatest leveller of Modern India.

I have now reached a stage where I feel insecure, unwanted and unimportant if the phone remains silent even for a short period of time. But in all honesty, 90% of the calls I receive in a day are those I can live without.

A sample of my callers, my ‘phone stalkers’ as I call them :

1. Twice a week, I get a call from an insurance company soliciting me to insure my worthy life with one of their 200 existing products or one that can be custom-made to suit my requirements.

2. On Sunday afternoons, when the entire house is at peace, a certain bank calls me, tempting me to take a documentation-free, hassle-free, (but unfortunately not interest- free) personal loan from them (can loans and troubles be anything but personal?).

3. Else, the call is about yet another unbelievable offer from a credit card company that wants me to spend more than I currently am, just when my last bill makes me think that is impossible and has me seriously considering a lifetime of austerity.

4. And then there are the calls from those high-end departmental stores requesting me to visit them for their bi-annual sales (maybe they are aware I would never buy their over-priced products at their normal rates) or that spa I visited over a year ago in another city that calls me religiously every month to remind me that it’s about time I paid them a visit to rejuvenate my tired body and soul.

5. My very own phone company calls me almost on a daily basis, suggesting that I change my plan as the current one is sub-optimal (translation : ‘you are not using your phone as much as we want you to, so please choose this new plan that will double your bill ).

Not all calls are a nuisance though. I am grateful for the call from the car company that reminds me that my vehicle is due for service. But what I dislike is the phone call the morning after asking me how my experience at the service centre was. The ill-timed call comes precisely at the moment I am reviewing their two-page ‘itemised bill’ that has fleeced me of a sizeable portion of my monthly earning and has me fuming over why parts that I didn’t even know existed in my car till that minute have been replaced, while the noisy A/c that I specifically complained about continues to drone.

Sometimes I long to throw my phone(s) away. Go back to the days of trunk calls, STD booths and snail mails; the simple days when I could escape into oblivion and be truly untraceable; when a bank meant a brick and mortar structure that I visited whenever I had a need, and took a loan strictly if and only if I needed one, and not because some nameless faceless peddler relentlessly stalked me on the phone!