An Article: The Telephone

The following piece is by Niranjana Narayanan, a member of the Cover Story team in Yamuna '10.

What would you do if you had to live without your mobile phone or your landline?

Try to exchange a kidney for your phone? Run around in circles because you simply don’t know what to do? Spend the rest of your life trying to re invent the greatness that is the phone?

Yep, that sounds about right.

The mother of all communication, the divine technological reincarnation of God, has assumed the status of a necessary appendage to the quintessential man.

Apparently, the human race did survive without these gizmos at one point of time. They didn’t get lost without GPRS, they weren’t anti-social, they managed to get through long commutes and classes without texting or listening to music (God knows how) and basically did very well for themselves. This leads to the question, are we the clever ones for using such advanced technology, or were they smart enough to live life without depending on a piece of metal and plastic?

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the phone, and believe it rubs shoulders with the likes of penicillin and the space shuttle when it comes to greatest inventions of our time, but how did our ancestors get by without them, and how did we fall so madly in love with them?

Letter writing was quite the hit in those days. They said it was an art, and that the power and beauty of the written word flourished. Grandparents have boxes of old letters, marked with memories. Telegrams were the fastest way to communicate and the easiest way to communicate was face to face, if you had the luxury of the person with whom you wished to talk in your vicinity. If you take a very Jane Austen view of the whole thing, it does look so very romantic with people writing long letters with a quill pen, and conversing in flawless English and local dialects, but to be really honest, I must say, that a tiny part of me thinks that all of that is just an excuse for not coming up with the telephone in the first place!

The fact remains, that while the black and white era certainly did live fabulously sans telephone, they still couldn’t talk to whoever they pleased, whenever they pleased. They couldn’t satisfy a worrying mother with a missed call upon reaching a certain destination in one piece, but had to let her worry for a couple of days till the letter reached her. They couldn’t keep in constant touch the way we do. They definitely couldn’t find the mass of the sun by looking down at a screen in the palm of their hands.

But then, they didn’t have to have a minor heart attack the way we do every time we realize something s missing in our jeans pocket or have to lock their phones away before exams to prevent being disturbed. They didn’t have to frantically search for a power outlet at a restaurant to charge a phone. And they surely were not kicked out of class for using a technological marvel.

Small price to pay, you say, for owning a life source? I agree.

All said and done, we’ve evolved. We invented something that changed the way we function from the very core. In this day, the world would practically lose its mind if all the telephones and mobiles stopped working. Such dependence on an external device is probably not the safest idea, but I believe we should celebrate this new appendage (which is a lot more useful than an appendix) while we’ve got it.

Viva la Telephone!