The world has changed much.
Back then, in what we could call the Mummage, when the telephones were in dial mode, we talked less, surreptitiously and guiltily. Along the years Indians rapidly learnt to shed their guilt of enjoying themselves and did so with abandon.
Remember the time when “talking” was considered a national waste— almost a crime during the dark years of the Emergency.
Remember this picture?
The hegemonic dictates “Work More, Talk Less” and “We Two Have Two” were pasted on the sides of buses, on the derriere of lorries, on signs all over the country. They had filled the Indian mind with a foreboding sense of hushed fear.
And then a couple of decades later came the riot of excessiveness of the cell phone era with their al luring “Talk More on Free Time” and “Free Talk” repeated in almost the same odious style of the infamous regime— plastering them on billboards and buses to colonise minds into endless, inane jabbering.
Well they succeeded— we are now in the age of constant communicating Jabberkhans: tell me if this breed can live without talking, texting or whatsapping inanities? Not anymore. From Bol India Bol we have graduated to a more appening stance.
Looking back, was it just 25 years ago that to make a phone call, we hostel inmates of a women’s college in Kochi had to beg and plead with the nuns?
It was a period when the 'rotary dialler' of the Indian telecommunication system was yet to be replaced by the simple 'push button' system. We had advanced from dialling the operator for a long distance call, and had gratefully begun to use the STD code that was in place. But the mobile was yet to be invented, so calls on the telephone were short and sweet.
Back to my story: The nuns of the women’s college considered the telephone a sacred instrument. So sacred, it required a phone guardian, who put a lock in the holes of the 1 and 2 numbers of the finger wheel. The lock acted as an impediment and rendered it impossible to dial the numbers. Importantly, she strung the cold steel key on a chain and hung it around her neck; the key snuggled and sighed in the warmth of her deep valley.
The telephone, a black crude bakelite instrument that belonged to the department of telecommunications, government of India, was placed in a small cupboard with a door in the wall. There was a narrow slit in the door that allowed you to slip your hand in and answer the phone if it rang.
The phone guardian, a young 16- year- old, with a squeaky voice was assigned no other work but to vigilantly guard the phone from seven in the morning till the commencement of classes and then again from four in the evening till bedtime. No one touched the finger dial; if anyone wished to make a call, the phone guardian dialled the number before handing the receiver to the caller, collected the money, carefully wrote down the name and number in the logbook.
Calls to boyfriends meant trouble. Big trouble. So boys, incestuously, called the hostel inmates, beautiful young girls, in the guise of father, brother and cousin. And the nuns kept tab on the outgoing calls and the entries that got more frequent were checked against numbers given by guardians. Numbers that didn’t correspond, they knew, were fraught with dangerous signals and immediately the guardian was informed of the caller’s behaviour and the very important phone number, like a precious jewel, was handed to them on a slip of paper. The nuns thought this system of peeking into the minds of young girls was absolutely foolproof— the heartbeats of the girls were well under their control.
Little did they know! Young girls hopelessly in love would do anything to speak to their male friends. Those innocent young things were phone- tapping experts who knew more about phones than the nuns. Though the finger wheel of the phone was locked, the rotary dial telephone used the pulse dialling system or the loop disconnect dialling, this worked by the telephone getting disconnected at specific intervals when a number was dialled. So one didn’t need to use the finger wheel at all: one had to just tap on the hook switch once for number 1, the telephone disconnected once and twice for number 2 and the telephone disconnected twice and so on... 10 times for 0 and pause between the numbers.
Those days, those girls may not have been on chat or whatsapp but the thrill of giving the phone guardian the slip and tapping the phone accelerated the heartbeats to feverish speeds like no mobile ever can.
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