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.