Recently some worthy-- his wife had presumably left him for good and he had joyfully married his cell phone instead without any fanfare -- was singing paens celebrating this versatile instrument of dubiously mixed value. He rightly pointed out that it has replaced multiple gadgets/props we use in our daily lives, ranging from alarm clock thru radio, tv, calendar, calculator, torch, banking assistant, payment gateway, dictionary, newspaper to its ultimate avator of information provider -- well one can go on ad infinitum. And he is right. What is more, I for one would not be surprised if the ubiquitous cell phone is also enabled to cool your drink, cook your meal and flush your toilet in the years to come. But not everyone thinks it has all been a joy ride without frequent bouts of pain. Literally. For instance, when you forget you are joined in the hip with this twin brother of yours, the phone in your hip pocket, and plonk down heavily collapsing into a seat, ouch, it hurts the bone there. But that is not all. A bum call goes out to someone you have been avoiding for years or worse, an awkward message is shot out to a friends' group instantly. Every member of the group would gleefully remember and recall this gem invariably in a group so that this embarassing information ripples out uncontrollably, ensuring that you remain the butt of jokes for a long time to come.
Some phones come with a plethora of proprietary apps and these make life miserable for you at unexpected moments. Having no interest in such apps, you ignore them completely. All of a sudden, when you are in the middle of a business exchange, there appears on the screen a totally unwanted casino game and throws you off. Try as you may, this leech of a game refuses to go away and exasperated, you perform that one panacea-act for all ills in a mobile phone, `reboot'. And lose whatever data or content you had been working on. With a painful explanation to follow to the counterpart who has been waiting for you to get back on line. Or some strange You Tube like app suddenly blares out an absolutely cringeworthy hiphop song featuring zombies of various denominations, which you cannot get rid of despite valiant effort. Again `reboot' is the only action you can resort to.
A month back, I was aghast when my dear wife asked me to clean up her phone. Being a hoarder par excellence, she keeps everything received and sent in the phone for years, as if all content is sacred and precious. Then it takes a month for me to bring it to some semblance of current state when I am tasked with cleaning up. This time, I found that she had apps for all kinds of things - one for ordering Avakkai pickle, one for paruppu podi, one for appalam, three for different fruit vendors (each one gives good banana, apple and oranges respectively, so three is the minimum required), some sixty seven undeleted groups which are no longer active and many members had already escaped from this world. This multiplicity of groups also meant some thousand messages were retained and approximately 75% just had a thumbs up or some other emoji. Earlier you could ignore these easily but recently, one messaging system has thought it wise and appropriate to draw your attention the emoticon with the message `Reacted to your message' as if that is a historic accomplishment! I carefully avoided shaking my head in frustration because her phone is so, so, sensitive that my simple nod might have resulted in unpalatable, mysterious gyrations which would eventually bring my intelligence into question when my dear wife reviews the phone after clean-up.
They make these phones ultra-sensitive nowadays to score some brownie points and deliberately programme some wrist or finger-tip movements to initiate specific actions, to satisfy some weird market segment. When one is warming up to some spirited argument and becomes all palms and fists, gesticulating feverishly to make one's point, all of a sudden the cell phone reacts, goes berserk and does something as if possessed, which you cannot decipher for the next few hours. If the all-purpose reboot option works fine, otherwise you have to visit a phone clinic, where a tehnician breezily pushes a few buttons and resurrects the phone. You end up looking very stupid and clueless. All because two shakes are programmed to mean the phone does one thing and one and a half clockwise jerks mean something else. You have to go through the phone manual in the smallest possible font before you figure out the various involuntary/deliberate actions and complicated results thereof. Older people would fine typing difficult because contrary to what they intend, the phone uses the senstitivty index to type out its own message, add the lottery aspect of auto-correct to complete the task. Most of the time, people do not check, assuming that what is going out is what they intended. Those people who have the habit of touching the screen all over instead of specific buttons, find that they have to do multiple iterations of the same exercise before they give up in frustration or succumb to the phone's dictat and send out whatever is there, hoping that the recipient would call to clarify. The problem is compounded if it goes out to the wrong recipient.
One of the most inconvenient things with the cell phones is you cannot evade any active seeker saying `I did not receive any call', or `I did not see any missed call' or any such inane lie because there is evidence in your phone that a call was indeed received and some people are not beyond checking your phone surreptitiously! They take the liberty to examine your phone and then you are discovered for what you are! Or worse still, all those not-so-charming faces which you have been happy avoiding for some time and have blissfully forgotten in the process, pop up suddenly in unannounced video calls to bring back all the nightmares of yore.
So, my take is the cell phone is not an unmixed blessing. It is great in many respects but there is significant downside too, like the hurt hip bone. Considering that, I would rather call this instrument an `anukoola chatru'! And to think that, some people carry two phones, each with two sim cards!! God cannot help them because they have gone beyond the pale!!
