Kabhi hum apne fone ko , kabhi uss ad ko dekhte hain

Waise to noone is chillaying "abhi , kahan gayab ho gaya tu !! Maloom tere bin roti nahi khayi jaatee thee mujhse !! " , but main ultra deluxe besharmo jaise bata deta hun , I had been busy with the dramatics club play we staged last night . Anyway , forget that , abhi tu apna bajaj scooter utha , go to the nearest magazine stall , buy the new year edition of 'Business today'. Turn around the cover page .You will see my color fotu with my right arm around Priyanka Chopra and left arm around Esha Deol and Mallika Sherawat holding up a table fan to my face and Lara dutta dangling Black Grapes over my head and Amisha Patel standing some feet away with a "Swami jee , mujhe bhee apni seva karnne dijiye na please" expression on her tiny face . Hai allah , me and my rangeen dreams.

Anyway ,if you turn the page , You will come upon an advertisement for a cellphone.

I mean , bhaiyya , the ad says that it is a cellphone . Though it looks like a 4 inch mercedes. I thought the "uee ma , main gayab ho gaya !" wala gadget Anil Kapoor found in Mr.India would be the most complex gadget to be invented. Now I do not. The cellphone in the advertisement has these features - Direct to TV output 2 mega pixel flash camera , 262K color QVGA TFT-LCD , expandable memory slot ,Dual speaker 3D sound , music player ( MP3 , AAC ,AAC+), camcorder and video messaging ( mpeg , h.263 ), piscel document viewer , bluetooth wireless , pictbridge printing and GPRS quadband. Hey raam , yeh fone hai ya mini satellite. Thinking of phones , mujhe flashback yaad aa raha hai bott zoro se.

When I was a little kid , I thought my dad was a photographer. When my nursery teacher asked the kids to name their dad's occupation , I said "mere pappa camera chalate hain". It was only when he pumped a 3 feet lamba vaccine into my mulayam kiddy bottoms that I surely knew that he was a doctor. But to my little brain , he remained a photographer because of his amar prem for photography. Vaccine stabbings and bright red capsules and savlon dabbings happened occasionally. What happened regularly was my dad cropping up with his japanese camera and clicking me and my sister .

My dad has clicked a three year old me splashing happily in a little orange plastic bathtub where I have this "I am nanga !! But who cares !!" expression on my face. He has clicked my two year old sister clutching an empty plastic bag and going 'shopping' on a five year old horse ( me ) , where she has this "jaldi karr ! Chintu sarees pe 50% sale lagee huee hain !" expression on her face. He has clicked a six year old me holding the receiver of our phone to my left ear with a "hey sonali , what are you doing this evening ? Let us meet over a couple of lollipops" expression on my stupid face. I remember the phone in our home at that time. It was black. It had that coiled wire connecting a big banana like receiver to a base heavy enough to outweight Riya Sen .It rang sometimes , with a simple 'Trrring Trrring'. Mostly , it was my mausi who used to chat with ma about Indore wali aunty's new jewellery set or some recipe for a 'never-seen-before' variety of halwa. In spite of these culinary disaster plots , those were telephonically peaceful times.


I got my first cellphone in the second year of my engineering. I still remember that kaali amaavas ki raat , when my dad called me to his room and opened the corner wali puraani almirah to bring it out. I saw it and yelled "uee ma!!" and ran away to hide behind the curtains. It was as big as a extra juicy bumper sized hotdog. The antennae on its top could have been used for pole vaulting over the college gate. When I sat down in the classroom ,with the cellphone in my trouser's pocket , the antennae found its way towards the front part and stuck out. When they noticed that , the boys whispered "idiot. Put that Delhi Police type walkie talkie on the table. The thing is sticking out ". When the girls saw that , they turned red and started turning the pages of their books in disgust . I hated that cellphone. In the final year,I got a new cellphone. This was much smaller and had no antennae. But the damage had already been done by the previous one . Some of the girls in my class still believe it was not the antennae.

*CoMmerciaL BreAk*

I have been looking for the track "Welcome to wherever you are - Bon Jovi". So if you could mail it to me at abhi844@yahoo.com , I shall gift you a colorful mobile cover and a lot of other useless goodies ! Hurry ! Mauka Nikal na jaye !. Sacchi , I want that number badly.

*Back to the damn stupid post*

Since then , a lot of contaminated paani has flown under the bridge. Kai Mausam guzar gaye , kai sardiyan guzar gayi , kai garmiyan guzar gayi, kai patjhad guzar gayi , kai spring guzar gaye , meri colony ke mr.taneja guzar gaye , and mere jeevan se kai cellphone guzar gaye . But I still got a very normal cellphone with no inbuilt megapixel cameras or inbuilt juicer-cum-mixers or inbuilt water dispensers or inbuilt flat screen televisions or inbuilt AK 47s. I dont even recall what is the model number of my handset for sure. For the 'features' part in my masoom gareeb cellphone , it has got a phone book , sms facility ( jispe airtel guys tell me that i can be the next indian idol or have lunch with shahrukh khan by sending L U N C H to 123 ) , and FM radio . I plug in the headphones when I feel the professor is too boring or when I want to look a "subhan allah , what a music diggin cool dude ! Yo maaan ! " types guy. And the phone can make and receive calls too.

I look at it and then at this advertisement before me. It seems I am some stone age animal , born in some stony cave with dinosaurs roaming around in the backyard , and me wearing deer skins as chaddis in routine and tiger skins as party wear chaddis , and using a normal cellphone when the world is moving onto this bhayankar gadget which they call a cellphone. But I think I will survive with this one. Atleast , When I sit down with it in my trouser pockets , it has no 'Bijli ka Khamba' sized antennae to visit awkward places .