a phony tale

the devil in a grey dress

‘Pick up the phone. Pick up the f****** phone!’ I heard the shout at least three times before I realized the origin of the oracle. It was my phone, it was my voice, it was in my pocket and it was ringing!

My phone is a Nokia 7650. I bought it a month after coming to Bangalore and I did not buy it at an antique shop. Didn’t I just read your mind? I had a Nokia 2300 phone when I was in Delhi. Unfortunately, a fellow passenger took a fancy for it and before I knew, he took more than just a fancy. I was left stranded and phone-less.

National Market near majestic is a shopper’s paradise - that is if you are a master at bargain. Other wise it is as good as going aboard a pirate’s ship with a crate of gold. Naveen, my shopping companion and senior from school, was boasting about his vast experience in the ‘art of bargaining’ gathered during his seven year reign in Bangalore as he dragged me through a congested alley. There were shops on either side selling things that ranged from a thumb-ring to a home-theater system. The shopkeepers looked as if they wanted a piece of me as they extended their hands towards us - supposedly waving, but slightly more physical in nature.

There it is, or rather, there they are – an unending line of shops selling mobile phones. Let me be frank, I did not take Naveen along for his bargaining skills (for I am a great bargainer myself); I took him along because my knowledge about mobile phones was limited to – ‘a portable species of phones which reduces in size every 2nd month.’ My eyes were scanning the whole place, and honestly, they did not convey much information to my brain. Naveen took hold of the opportunity and started off a highly jargonized conversation with the shopkeeper. He was talking about the camera configuration, the internal memory, Bluetooth (hey, I thought Bluetooth was used in computers), Infra-red(WTF?) and loads of other things which took turns in sounding Greek and Latin to my ears.

‘Dude, how about this one?’ My eyes leaped out of their sockets at the sight of the ‘thing’ that he held in his hand. Love at first sight literally. As I checked out the camera on the phone, my eyes leaped a step further out. I did not even bother to bargain. I bought it.
For the next half an hour, the owner of the phone(me) was completely ignored by the prospective user of the phone(Naveen, as it seemed to me) Excuse me reader. At this point I would like to bring to your attention the fact that this is a second-hand phone. This model is not available in the market anymore, and it is one hell of a job to change its outer casing. All of these facts, expect the first one, were not imparted to me by my enthusiastic friend, who had by now discovered every possible nuance in my phone. He further persuaded me to take a ‘Hutch Connection’ simply because he had one and he could make calls from one hutch phone to another at a lower rate. How interesting would that be. Chatting away to glory with a guy who was my roomie, whom I saw for 12 hours everyday. The higher STD rates and poor connectivity were incentives which I would later be aware of.

‘You paid 5k for this Iron Box!’ are not exactly the words you like to hear when you proudly present the phone before your room-mate. I tried to repeat everything the shopkeeper had told me about this amazing gadget. ‘So what’s the big deal? You have got an Iron Box with Bluetooth connectivity and a 1.1 mega pixel camera,’ was the prompt reply. I walked to the balcony, with an ‘I don’t give a damn’ look,’ and made plans for my inaugural call.

‘I can’t hear you!’ replaced ‘hello mom’ as the first words spoken into my phone. I rushed to the kitchen (the quietest place in my house) and replaced the ‘I can’t hear you’ with ‘How are you mom?’ I asked her to call me back as I have been a miser all my life.
The call never came. After half an hour when I picked up the phone, the message on the screen read – ‘3 missed calls.’ I had just discovered the first of the shortcomings.

The camera however was a stunner. Wow! That is cool, I thought. A week later, the camera started losing its eagle eye and showing its true colour. I was knee deep in thick shit. Wait a second! I have Bluetooth and all that jazz. Let the camera and the speakers go to hell. I still have got my Bluetooth working perfectly. Bluetooth came into the act two weeks later. It accepted comwarrior.sys (which I initially thought was a game from a good friends and which I later identified as a virus from a complete stranger) which in turn impregnated my outbox with innumerable picture messages.

2 months have gone by since I was transformed from a prince to a pauper. Quoting my friend – ‘I am left with an Iron Box that is deaf, dumb, blind and with a viral infection.