The changing ringtone of truth

It has been predicted that coming generations will be born with stunted fingers and a hyper-evolved thumb, thanks to their forefathers’ extensive use of the mobile phone.

The cell phone is doing strange things to our lives. Today as I was coming to work in the Salt Lake-Minto Park “shuttle-car” with eight other people, a young girl in a pink tee was discussing with a friend, a man, a friend of a friend, she has known for just two weeks. “But he calls me up so often. Also after dinner. I said I have no problem if he calls me up, but it’s better if it’s not after dinner. Then he started to discuss Sameer. He said Sameer had issues and did not deserve me. I said why are you bringing Sameer into this and that means you have a problem...”

The mobile has shattered the divide between the public and the private. In the street, in a bus, at an airport, ringtones that give your soul away, sound bites and snatches of conversations bombard you and offer tantalising, intimate glimpses into lives of complete strangers.

But the cell phone has also changed the nature of Truth. It is causing more and more men and women to come under severe moral pressure. It is making them lie.

Healthy protests have stopped employers from installing GPS (global positioning system; the technology that would allow the monitor to pin you down to where you were, say near Forum, or City Centre, which is Big Brother in action) in their employees’ phones. But a parent, a partner or a boss often serves the same function. There is a call every second hour, or even more frequent, from the workplace, or from home, asking the user to confess. Where is she? How long will it take her to come back? Who is she with? Is she at the meeting she was supposed to be at, or having Pan Fried Chicken Chowmein with a friend? This actually happened. A friend was having the aforementioned dish at a restaurant and cribbing about her boss, who was in the same restaurant, though she hadn’t seen him. He called her up and asked what she was doing. She said she was at a meeting. He said she was lying; she was having Pan Fried Chicken Chowmein. From then on she came to be known as Pan Fried Chicken Chowmein in office.

But that did not stop her. She claims that people like her, sales and marketing persons, are forced to lie more on the cell phone due to the nature of their jobs. She says that the way a person cups her hand over the cell phone as she sips her coffee and says in a muffled voice “I-Am-At-A-Meeting-Can-I-Call-You-Later” gives away the fact that she is a senior marketing executive, lying. But I think mobile lying is not restricted to one profession.

All the professions are involved. I was watching Casino Royale at a theatre the other day and was still stunned that Daniel Craig, who looked like an unwashed Chechen terrorist in the photographs, looked so heartbreakingly nice on the big screen, and he had just spat out “Do I look like I care a damn?” to the waiter who asked him whether he liked his Martini shaken or stirred, when a mobile phone rang. Like they always do. “I am out of station and at an important meeting,” boomed a young male voice into the phone. I later identified the body that went with it. It belonged to a software man, who had his company ID hanging from his neck, which always reminds me of uniformed school-kids.

Businessmen, too. The place where I work is surrounded by watering holes, the refuge of the weary after a hard day at Chandni Chowk. There it is very common to find a beige safari-suit clad man bellowing to someone on the phone: “Arrey yaar, client ke saath hai,” when the person sitting opposite him may be a particularly well-endowed woman.

It could be a lie, or just another version of the truth. Being with Daniel Craig can perhaps be called “an important meeting”, if you are looking at a computer screen the whole day and still on call when you have just managed to sneak out. Being with a friend at a restaurant can perhaps be called “an important meeting”, if you are chasing targets the whole day and the boss is calling every half-an-hour to check on you. Truth, Version 2.0.0.7.

These people wouldn’t probably have been lying if they weren’t being checked all the time. Down with Big Brother. Ban mobile phones.