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It's been a while since most of us have gotten "unused" to monophonic ringtones, the kind of sounds early Nokia phones used to make. I went to the college mess for breakfast and suddenly heard that Oh-so-familiar sound from someone's old Nokia. Or was it a new phone with the classic ringtone, I know not.

But since I have an exam tomorrow, I have all the time in my life to sit, ruminate and write about cellphones. So here goes nothing...

If you happen to be born after 1990, you have actually witnessed a paradigm shift in communications technology! The Cellular phone! It's not like the ones born before 1990 didn't witness the advent of the cellphone. But in case you were born somewhere in the 1920s, there is a good chance you didn't witness the paradigm shift in communications technology. The ones born in the 30s and 40s have spent their life abhoring the Cell phone, at least for the time they have been around it. And the folks born between 1950-80 are just getting by, thinking about the revolutions they witnessed in their lifetimes.  And last, but not the least, the folks born in the 80s are wondering what happened in the decade they were born in, for they are not sure if anything did.

The 90s kids, we couldn't have timed our entries better into this world! We grew up, I'd say EVOLVED with the cellphone! Having said that, it's not that we did BIG SHIT by synchronizing our births with the advent of th cellphone. Maybe we did. But just saying...

I remember my dad purchasing his first cellphone. As in most cases, it was a Nokia 5170. Not that I remembered the model number. I just Google searched "Nokia antenna phone", and Woalah! The 5170's was the first image to pop up! By the way, if you type "Google" as "google", the spell-checker gives a spelling error. There is no error if you type "Nokia" as "nokia". As a matter of fact, both "Nokia" and "nokia" are non-existent words. Strange. Why is Google so up its own arse? Eh? Well, that's another discussion for another day.

So, where was I? Oh ya! My dad bought the 5170. And at first, games on the phone were allowed. Basically, no "SNAKE", if you know what I mean. Besides, the phone was new, we were kids, and pissing dad off wasn't the most intelligent thing to do, or so we thought, rather so, I thought. So, for a 8 year old ME, the cellphone was an "off-limits" commodity.

By the way, in India, the cellphone craze began a tiny bit before Nokia. I personally know a few "early adopters", who payed Rs. 50000 to buy a cellphone, that looked the size of a telephone exchange! This was when local and STD rates were around Rs. 5/min and Rs. 10/min respectively. Again, why? Strangely, today, people still purchase phone worth Rs. 50000. Only difference being that this one phone is capable of doing the work of all the country's telephone exchanges put together! Moving on...

The Nokia phones had a bunch of ring tones. And this was all before the phone came with an mp3 player, if you remember. And we used to listen to the ring tones for fun. Bourgeoisie idea of fun I guess. I know. Even remembering this sounds stupid. Chuck it! The first big change to the cellphone was polyphonic ring tones. That just HAD TO BE a feature for a phone to qualify as "Worth purchasing". Then came the "Color screen". Then came the phone camera. These three features came into the market in quick succession.

And THEN, CAME the MOTO RAZR!!!!!!

The RAZR was the first sexy looking phone, without a doubt! It was so sexy, that it is still sexy, just in case anyone is still in possession of one. Wow! It looked like the sight of a ripped beach body, where everyone else on the beach looked like blobs of fat! And it was a fucking flip-phone! Till now, having a phone was considered stylish to an extent. But ripping a phone out of your pocket, jerking it to open the screen, and then putting it to your head to talk?? It was the stuff of movies!! That said, very often, the screen never flipped open each time you jerked th phone. Specially if you were with a lady you wanted to impress, I suppose. Then, you had to use your other hand to open the screen, which killed the phone's "coolness" factor. Maybe that's why the phone caught on, but never stayed for long... All because the folks at Motorolla made the screen hinge too tight! Sad..

Around this time, another thing was catching up, specifically in the corporate world. The thing with the QWERTY keypad.. The Blackberry! After the Moto Razr's sex appeal wore off, every grown up Tom, Dick and Harry wanted to look official. So Blackberries became a trend of sorts. Nokia had a stint with their E-series to give Blackberry a run for their money. Not the most successful move in history.

All this was still when cellphones were strictly not allowed in school. And if you did get on to school, you'd be considered a BOSS! In case you got caught ,your parents would tell the teachers.... "We gave it to our child for safety.". The teacher would have thought something like: 

"WHAT?? About 5 generations of Indians, if not more, went to school without cellphones. And as far as anyone knows, most of them did fine! And now, just because you can't deal with your kid's tantrums, you stuffed a cellphone into his/her hands? Goodness! You must suck as parents! Haven't you read the book "Parenting FOR DUMMIES" yet??"

Jokes, apart, the cellphone might have helped make the world a safer place for kids. Maybe... Just maybe. But let's agree that wasn't why you as kids wanted the phone. I'm sure none of us really said "Mom, Dad, could you get me a cellphone? I feel that the world is a very hostile place, and I'll feel a bit safer if I can reach you at any point of time". NO! That never happened! Not unless you were really smart. Most of us would have been like...

Mummmaaayyy! I want a cellphone because my friend's parents got him/her a cellphone!!!(For a majority of  the cases)

The touchscreen had raised its head by now, around 2005, although not in the mainstream cellphone market. But the PDAs , palm pilots, smart phones and a few other devices had touch feature. Mind you, XEROX, the company had already developed Touch Screen at the time Steve Jobs was out to artistically steal their User-interface for Apple's desktop computers, way back in the 80s. Goodness knows what took the "touch" feature so long to downscale.

For now, Nokia and Sony could revel in the success of their N-series, and Walkman series mobile phones.

All of a sudden, the iPhone struck. No on really understood what exactly happened. It must have been a fad in the U.S.A the very moment Steve Jobs gave his "Every once in a while, there comes a product that changes everything" speech. But here, in India, it was more of an underground movement, before iPhone became a fashion statement here, like it is now. The Chinese were the first to strike with their gimmicky iPhone lookalikes. They flooded the market with all sorts of things. This is even before the touch-screen fad hit the masses. And hence, as with all ill-timed maneuvers, no one payed heed to the Chinese folks doing their thing. Copying! But soon, mobile phone companies got insecure of this new thing that had hit the market by storm. So we had the Samsungs, the HTCs, and then, just a bit later, the LAVAs, Micromax, Spice and the rest. This has been going on for the last three years. The processor speed on one cellphone can run all of Nokia's 90s and early 2000s production facilities, and maybe even their current ones. If a mobile phone's instruction manual were the bible, words like RAM and megapixel would be blasphemy, given the times people boast of their phone's features. Strangely, despite processor speeds enabling cellphone functions beyond our ability to use them, despite that the iPhone has started to "bend" at its own whim, it still remains a style statement(Maybe not for long).

To the extent that.....

Earlier

You: "Mom! Where's my phone?"

Mom: Magically finds it out of thin air, and hands it over to you...

Now

You: "Mom! Where's my iPhone?"

Mom: (still)Magically finds it out of thin air, and hands it over to you...

Yes, I do realize that I have an exam tomorrow, and that I haven't studied a word in the last 2 days. And so, I shall take your leave. So give me your leave, and let me go! And stop bending over your phone!

P.S. : Just in case you have an uncle/ an older male in your family, who had a love marriage, and who happily gives you advice on how to go about dealing with the ladies, don't think much. Make use of his advice. The dandy fellow did all the hard work of wooing his lady... that too without a phone! The chap must've been a genius!