Ring in the ringtones

On a cool and pleasant monsoony evening several months ago, I was at the home of an old academic friend in Hyderabad, and we were doing what old friends do when they get together.

We were absorbed deep in conversation until our peace was shattered by the loud and unpleasant ringtones of a mobile phone. My host was more embarrassed than surprised, and as he turned to his nine-year-old, I realised that he didn’t know what to do.

‘‘I don’t care if it is ‘U are my Sonia’ or the ‘Ketchup Song Chorus’, just turn it off.’’ The nine-year-old, knowing that he had the upper hand, was about to negotiate an especially rich deal with his helpless father. ‘‘Okay, so it’s from Boom, but please stop it.’’ My host obviously was unfamiliar with the iron law of technology — be nice to the young for they know how to fix your DVD, computer, mobile and whatever else you are unfortunate enough to own.

Face it, technology does separate the generations, and the young are ahead. I learned this the hard way when we first got our VCR and I saw my bargaining position diminish versus my children because I couldn’t get it to work.

My host in Hyderabad threw up his hands, and moaned that if ringtones were the promise of economic reforms, then he could do without them. I gently reminded him that not so long ago he had been waiting in queue for five years to get a telephone, and when it was finally ‘‘sanctioned’’ he had distributed sweets to his neighbours. Now, a few years after the telecom reforms, farmers and fishermen have mobiles and India is the fastest growing telephone market in the world. The same thing happened when Indira Gandhi introduced modest reforms in cement in the early 1980s. Within two years we went from kow-towing to the cement controller for two bags of cement to become one of the largest cement producing nations in the world.

This episode also makes one realise just how badly our government misjudged technology. It was so busy protecting BSNL’s turf that it saw the cellphone as a toy of the rich, and priced a call obscenely at Rs 16 per minute with the added insult of making us pay for incoming calls. Smaller and smarter governments viewed the mobile as a tool for development and priced calls cheaply. Now, even our government predicts that in three years there will be more mobiles than fixed phones in India.

The third lesson is that governments can’t prevent people from having fun. In the 1950s our do-gooder socialist government decided that All India Radio was meant to educate, and so we had interminable classical music concerts on AIR, which 1,458 people enjoyed in the whole country. But what did the millions do? They listened to film songs on Radio Ceylon.Years went by and finally the government conceded that radio was a medium of mass entertainment, and we got Vividh Bharati.

Since governments never learn, the same infamous history story was repeated with Doordarshan until Subhash Chandra pioneered cable TV. Doordarshan can only be saved if it gets full autonomy from the government, and if its new CEO will remember that Indians love to have fun and India is the greatest story-telling culture in the world. Not only our epics, but also our wonderful animal stories in the Panchatantra, the Hitopadesha, as well as kavya, such as Kathasaritsagara, offer the greatest repository of mass entertainment for all Indians. So, ring in the ringtones.