There has been a great deal of hype about mobile connections and cell phones becoming cheap and inexpensive. I was quite amused to see a road sweeper brandish one a few days aback! Just about everyoe now has a cell phone. Having a cell phone used to be a status symbol before, but not any more. Now the your status is decided (or assumed to be so) by the brand and model of ur cell phone.
It is good to see atrue telecom revolution happening. But I wonder if we were ready for this. Alvin Toffler mentions is “Future Shock” that the changes are taking place at an accelerating pace over time. He predicts that at some point, the this pace will be more than we (humans) can handle, and that is will be the a flash point. I suspect we are reaching there in India, with respect to the cell phone revolution here. The cell phone revoltion swept us like a tidal wave, and we sure werent ready for it. The issue is simple, everyone has a cell phone but doesnt know when and how to use it. It is hardly surprising to see a random entity barking away to glory on his cell phone when u go to a restaurent for a quite evening. There have been a few incidents with me that irked me to the extent of giving the folks a pice of my mind, almost (Now I regret having held myself back).
This happened sometime back when I was on my bike with a friend on mine in the pillion. We are riding at 70 and about to enter the mekri underpass when his cell phone rings. It turns out to be som efemale from B’bay who he likes flirting with. He asks me to stop the bike, and he starts making small talk with her while I am parked on the side of the underpass just waiting for him to get off the phone, so that we can ride on. Apparently, the ride to the hotel for dinner is that last thing on this mind and he starts flirting with her on the corner of a busy road for over 15 minutes!!! Its really hard to contain yourself when you are treated like that. But I had to keep my mouth shut, for more reasons than one.
At another time, I got a green signal at a junction and I took off. A few seconds after the junction, a random moron on a bike overtakes me from the left, places himself infront of me and with little warning he slows down to a crawling 30 kmph! I was almost about to bump into him, thank god my brakes were in a good shape and I downshifted on time. I overtake him to see his neck bent to one side and he is chatting on the phone oblivious of the menace that he is being to everyone else, and I am quite sure that cared less about it.
After these episodes, I googled for websites on cell phone ettiquette and ironically, very few of the bad ettiquette that we see everyday is actually mentioned there. I guess it assumes that people with cell phone are above a certain intellectual or mental threshold. Sadly it is not so in India. Like I said before, we simply werent ready for this to happen :)
Among the hits I found on google, this was the best: The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette
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