As I was lazily snoozing the alarm on my iPhone in half woken slumber , a picture came to my mind.-My first cell phone , the Nokia 3310. It was big and blue and my constant companion for a good 6 years.It was back in 2003. India was a land where mobile phones were not so much in vogue as it is now. Incoming was also charged at around Rs 5 per min and even those select few blessed with the latest gadgetry hardly ever answered calls unless it was urgent.Then TRAI made incoming calls free. It was then that my mother, who wanted to keep tabs on her teenage daughter in college persuaded my dad to get me a cell phone. A small sleek (by the standards of the time) Nokia 3310. I was the least happy of the lot. Not only did I not want frequent calls from my mom asking where I was , but the fact was that being the scatter brain that I was , I was pretty confident that I would lose it somewhere in the course of the month.
But soon , for the first time in life , people started looking for me in hostel. I became an overnight celebrity as there were very few in the girls hostel who had cell phones .Hostel mates with boyfriends queued up to use my cell phone and in 2 years , the phone was witness of hundreds of hours of sugar coated puppy love.By the last year of college , cell phones became cheaper and more common and the use of my cell phone diminished considerably. It was then that I realised the power of the composer in the phone. I spent many fun hours trying desperately to create some new ring tones with not much success.
Later in 2004 when I got engaged and moved to Bangalore for my first job, the phone became a symbol of my new status as I was almost always on call with my fiance.Later the phone would also see a large number of international calls as my fiance moved to US and I emptied my pockets constantly to make expensive international calls.As the mobile world changed around ,me with people opting for sleeker and newer phones, I was looked at with disdain for holding on to my old phone.Do you use it to throw at stray dogs to keep them away was a common refrain I heard in those days. But I held on .. I had to change batteries three times and kept the phone which woke me up faithfully every day and kept me company all day long.
Everything has a life and life cycle and that was what I found out in 2006 , when I tried in vain to get the phone to charge up . It stubbornly refused to do so even after changing the battery and the charger and that was when I realised that it was the end of a long and eventful comradeship.
I got a Samsung 2310 after that and then a Nokia 3100 ,and now finally an IPhone.As I am gently touching the touch screen of the iPhone , I think of all those text messages hammered down into the hard keyboard of 3310. How times have changed.
But soon , for the first time in life , people started looking for me in hostel. I became an overnight celebrity as there were very few in the girls hostel who had cell phones .Hostel mates with boyfriends queued up to use my cell phone and in 2 years , the phone was witness of hundreds of hours of sugar coated puppy love.By the last year of college , cell phones became cheaper and more common and the use of my cell phone diminished considerably. It was then that I realised the power of the composer in the phone. I spent many fun hours trying desperately to create some new ring tones with not much success.
Later in 2004 when I got engaged and moved to Bangalore for my first job, the phone became a symbol of my new status as I was almost always on call with my fiance.Later the phone would also see a large number of international calls as my fiance moved to US and I emptied my pockets constantly to make expensive international calls.As the mobile world changed around ,me with people opting for sleeker and newer phones, I was looked at with disdain for holding on to my old phone.Do you use it to throw at stray dogs to keep them away was a common refrain I heard in those days. But I held on .. I had to change batteries three times and kept the phone which woke me up faithfully every day and kept me company all day long.
Everything has a life and life cycle and that was what I found out in 2006 , when I tried in vain to get the phone to charge up . It stubbornly refused to do so even after changing the battery and the charger and that was when I realised that it was the end of a long and eventful comradeship.
I got a Samsung 2310 after that and then a Nokia 3100 ,and now finally an IPhone.As I am gently touching the touch screen of the iPhone , I think of all those text messages hammered down into the hard keyboard of 3310. How times have changed.
