War of Words

“Mobile phones – a boon or a curse”, this is the title of the essay I was asked to write during an interview with a call center. And I got that job. Now, we can no longer debate on such topics. We have reached a stage where we can assertively say, mobile phone is a necessity. In this post, I will attempt to cover the journey of mobile phones usage and development, based on my experience with it.

Free Incoming : A decade ago, there was a time when mobile incoming calls were charged at around 6 or 7 Rs per minute. Mobile phones were once considered luxurious and only rich people and upper middle class had access to it. Things have changed a lot now. The first step towards making mobiles easily accessible to the middle class was to make the incoming calls free of cost. Simultaneously, low cost mobile hand sets were being launched, which fueled the growth of mobile phone usage.

Competitive Market: Over the years, a highly competitive market brought down call charges drastically. Telecom companies introduced several offers, including the attractive ones for corporate people (Free of cost when calls are made within organization). Also, cash rich new entrants in the mobile market came up with many innovative offers and plans. (Tata Indicom, Docomo’s per second pulse). The incumbent service providers were forced to reduce the charges, introduce new schemes to retain the customer base.

Per second billing, 3G, MNP: Yesterday’s announcement by TRAI to make per second billing mandatory for all service providers sent a shiver in the market. Major telecom stocks tumbled, as this move by TRAI will bring down their revenues by almost 15%. As a Bharti Airtel shareholder, I was sad that my stocks went down, but at the same time, I was happy that my monthly mobile bills will come down. Mobile Number Portability (MNP), is going to ring in very soon in India. This will enable the customers to switch service providers without changing their number. Most people like me would try to experiment with different service providers, if allowed to retain the number. It is quite surprising to know that Pakistan has already implemented MNP. With the arrival of 3G, wireless data transfer will reach new levels.

Survival of the fittest: No industry in India is as competitive as the telecom industry. In addition to current players, other global operators (Telenor-Unitech) are also entering Indian market in the near future. This will make the game more tough. If the growth rate is sustained at same level, a report predicts, in six years, almost every Indian will own a mobile. And we the existing customers, continue to enjoy the best offers.

Bavard

Bavard means talkative, chatterbox in French. This is a nick name given to me by one of my French teacher in school days. But I have changed myself of late. Anyway, this post is not related to it. Its about the increased mobile usage among youth and working class in Bangalore and my observations related to it.
Thanks to proliferation in mobile technology, virtually everyone now has a mobile. The trend here in Bangalore among youth and working people(techies in 20s) is that a person will have more than one SIM. There are several reasons for this. First, most of them would be from near by states like Tamil nadu, Andhra and Kerala. They often visit their native and some even once a week. So, its convenient to use a SIM card of that state to avoid heavy roaming charges. The second reason is that have SIM cards which will be used to talk to friends who are just restricted to phone. In most of the cases, they never meet each other but would talk for hours in mobile.
This is increasingly evident in areas where most of the working youth stay like Madivala, Koramangala etc.. When I stayed in Madivala, I can never make a call between 7.30 to 10 PM. Reason is that, when I look around, there will be a bunch of ladies hostels, in which several girls will be walking around, talking on their mobile. I am not cynical, and I admit that a considerable percentage of them would be talking to their parents and family. However, I have observed few cases, where they admit that they talk to phone/chat friends.
I also have a curious example to write about. I have a friend who is a Muslim and works for a Islamic Tamil magazine. He use to call this as “Vaai vibacharam”(Verbal prostitution) and says Islam prohibits it. Well and good. But one fine day, he got call from a woman, who found his mobile number on the magazine. She was a married woman and got converted (embraced :)) to Islam after marriage. Their conversations were mostly about Islam with little or no information about personal life. Since there was nothing profane or obscene in their conversation, he didn’t restrict himself from it. However, once in a while he used to advise her not to talk, as it is against their religion, but she couldn’t.
By the way, I am no exception and I have tried talking to few women, whose number I got through social networking sites. But, they didn’t turn out to be the right “Intellectual Company” (Manmadha Leelai fame 🙂 ) for me. Moreover, I hate talking for long hours in mobile and I couldn’t continue that.
This habit turns out to be a serious problem once they get committed to someone. Recently, a girl known to me was with her fiancé. At that time, She was continuously getting calls from one such phone friend and she kept disconnecting. Finally, she switched off the mobile. He picked the mobile and switched it on and saw a message saying “I miss you”….I would leave it to the reader’s imagination to guess what happened next.