A Road Trip

I had to travel to Belagondanapalli, a small hamlet on Hosur-Thally road, about 40 odd kilometers from Bangalore, on an official trip. Though that area is one of the business hubs of Tamil Nadu, I had been cautioned against expecting any semblance of city life. The other city-slickers like me were vehement in their comparison of that place to anything from a barren desert to an overgrown jungle. So, it was with an air of zilch expectations that I started out on this trip in an Indica, with a rather nervous driver, who had the bizarre habit of backing out of an overtaking manoeuvre when it was about 80% completed.

Driving down Sarjapur road (to avoid the traffic on Hosur road), I realised how small a city Bangalore was. We were just a few kilometres from Koramangala, the image of modern-day Bangalore and which wouldn’t have been out of place in any big city of the world with its malls and hip crowd, and all we could see were open fields and grape plantations with an odd marble and granite dealers exhibiting their wares by the roadside. Only the sky-scraping apartment complexes coming up hither and thither betrayed the fact that we were not far from the IT hub of Bangalore. At Sarjapur, we took a right turn to take the Attibele road and it was an apposite time to switch off the air-conditioning and draw in the windows for the atmosphere her was as pristine as I’ve ever seen. An enroute temple in the shape of a mace, dedicated to Lord Hanuman, caught my attention and my friend caught it on his camera phone. Just minutes after Attibele, we crossed over into Tamil Nadu without even a perfunctory check at the border and immediately were greeted by posters and banners of the “Rising Sun” and the “Two Leaves”, a reminder of how politics dominates the scene there.

Belagondanapalli didn’t disappoint me. It was a small rural community, with a few shops and houses. We stopped for breakfast at what we had nicknamed “The Taj Hosur”, which was nothing more than a few tables and stools under a tiled roof. The breakfast was good and cheap, as is expected in most of Tamil Nadu. Even though I would have liked to traverse the fields and chat up with the locals, my work kept me busy for most of the day and on subsequent trips over the next few days to that place, I couldn’t help wondering if I could ever live in such a place, away from the hustle and bustle of city life and decided to give it a try a few decades down the line, after I retire.

The Hanuman Temple, shaped like a Mace.

Sunset over the fields

The "Taj Hosur"

She's the reason I was there

My Mobile Saga

I’ve been using my present mobile for more than four years, what would amount to sacrilege among the present Gen-X who trade their handsets for a latest one almost every six months or so. I’ve decided finally that it is time I traded in my mobile handset for a new one with all those amazing features I don’t really need at present, but, may be needed in the future, most of them being weird acronyms like EDGE, HSCSD, GPRS, and WLAN etc.

I bought (actually my old man gifted the handset to me) my first mobile phone many years ago when the telecom revolution in India was still in its infancy. I was working in Mumbai and my parents in Bangalore insisted that I be in regular contact with them. The mobile handset was a Siemens C-25, purchased in Bangalore and the connection in Mumbai was Orange, which charged about Rs. 4 per minute for an outgoing call and more than Rs.2 per minute for an incoming call, contrasting with the Rs. 0.99 per minute outgoing and free incoming that I’m charged today. It was kind of cool to have a mobile phone during those days when they were still a luxury and I plead guilty to the charges of ostentatiously flaunting it around. Soon, I discovered two major shortcomings in the phone. It didn’t have an internal clock and I couldn’t tell if the missed call I had on my phone was a few minutes or a few days old. I had to erase the call lists regularly to avoid this ambiguity. Since it lacked a clock, it didn’t have an alarm function and I had to rely on an alarm clock to wake for those early morning shifts. Also, I never got the name of the person sending me an SMS – the phone only displayed the person’s number. After using this phone for well over a year, I decided to trade it for what was my dream mobile of that time, the Nokia 3310.

I never did buy the Nokia 3310, even though I did use my friend’s 3310 handset for some time. I rather hesitatingly went for an almost unheard of mobile phone at that time, Mitsubishi’s Trium Mars, much cheaper than the Nokia 3310, a decision which I have never regretted. All I wanted in my mobile was an alarm and good SMS capabilities but, Trium gave me much more. I now had a phone memory to store contacts in addition to my SIM memory; it had games (especially PUSH), a T9 dictionary to help compose messages, multiple language options and the best feature – a speaker phone. Even though the battery life was rather poor, I found its software much advanced than that of Nokia (For example, Trium had the call details for own network as well as the roaming networks separately). It didn’t have downloadable ringtones, picture message features and had a rather awkwardly protruding antenna, but I absolutely adored this phone. After almost 2 years of satisfactory use, it was peer pressure more than anything else that made me go for Nokia though I did have problems with the phone continuing to ring even after the answer button had been pressed. However, considering that this problem started after I dropped this phone from a height of about 30 feet from a cherry-picker, I shouldn’t be complaining.

The mobile phone market had exploded by then and almost everybody had a mobile phone. The markets were flooded with cheap handsets and using a phone with an external protruding antenna was totally uncool. Orange had still not become Hutch and therefore still retained its reputation. It was the golden period of free SMS in Mumbai and Trium had a grave problem of being able to store only 20 messages. This forced me to choose between messages from special persons and messages that were otherwise important. I also couldn’t play all those catchy ringtones others were playing. Though camera phones were the in-thing, most of the Nokia ones were obscenely expensive. So, I settled on Nokia 6610, the main attractions being a colour display, a very large text message memory and FM radio. This is the phone I’ve had ever since. There are minor niggles like the infra-red being practically useless and an almost non-existent internal memory for ringtones and pictures but, there are other priceless attributes like the Profiles which has enabled me to sit through meetings without embarrassing moments, it is much lighter and handy than my previous phone, has a decent battery life (though I’ve changed the battery once last year after 3 years of usage) and it has a four-way scroll button which I was used to in the Trium. GPRS enabled me to check my mails but Orange’s steep pricing made me cancel the subscription and stick to Internet Cafés.

Now, I need a phone to access my mails and I’d also like to store music and have a decent camera. Bluetooth would also be preferable so that I can exchange music and videos with my friends. I have shortlisted the Sony-Ericsson P1i, the Nokia N-95 and the O2 Life for my next phone unless the Apple i-phone or the HTC TytnII comes to India. After a cursory comparison, the Sony-Ericsson P1i looks to be the best bet. Nokia N-95 is probably the most fully loaded phone in the Indian market as of now but I’m not comfortable with the slider design and I don’t mind not having a GPS or EDGE. As for the OS, I’m slightly inclined towards Symbian compared to the new Windows Mobile 6 (as in O2 and HTC). Though I would have preferred a full-fledged QWERTY keyboard instead of tilt buttons, I’m not that much into messaging and will use my computer to reply to mails. I’ve had just three phones in 7 years, and I’ve been lucky enough not to experience any serious problems like phones hanging or software getting corrupt. I’m now ready for a new phone and I’ll wait until the Diwali offers cause a drop in the present prices, by which time, I should have decided on the make.

Penny Wise...

Yesterday, I watched a movie called “Loins of Punjab”, an evening show at the PVR – a bungled up effort of what could have been a much better film with a rehashed storyline and slicker editing. Though the movie was entertaining for its duration of less than 100 minutes, my friends and I unanimously agreed that it was not worth the Rs.210 (special weekend rate for a seat which didn’t even recline) we spent on the ticket, not to mention the exorbitantly charged popcorn and Pepsi (and the parking charges for the vehicle, I quipped). It seems such a long time ago that a film ticket used to cost Rs.10 or Rs.15 in a decent theatre and the up-market ones hardly exceeded Rs.25, but, it was not so long ago. The better part of my college days were spent at various theatres around Bangalore, when Bangalore still was a city for the pensioners. The first genuine mall came up in the city less than five years ago and in these five years, that I have been away for the better part, it sure has changed for the worse.

“Disposable Incomes.” I do hate this phrase, the two words that have been cited as being responsible for much of the woes of any big city today. In Bangalore, the effect is only more noticeable due to the large IT crowd. I don’t work in an IT or IT-related company, and probably make more money annually than most of my IT friends. But, I am flabbergasted at the “easy come, easy go” approach of the IT horde towards money. My friends and neighbours whom I’ve seen growing up in middle-class families, not much different from mine, where both parents had to work to ensure a comfortable living, are now splurging like there’s no tomorrow. The call-centres, IT boom and the BPOs may have given them a financial freedom the previous generation never had but I don’t agree that it has made them financially any wiser than their parents. Of late, it has become a hobby of mine, watching the antics of this affluent pack in any coffee shop or multiplex, flaunting their nouveau-rich status akin to the plastic ID cards they sport. I have never been parsimonious and my fiscally arduous childhood has ensured that I can never be a spendthrift. It is one lesson that I did learn rather early in life and hope I never forget.