Fascination, menace & the phone
By Adil Jussawalla

THERE was a time when people didn’t want a phone connection. Single men and women, grown used to their solitude, disliked the idea of sharing their rooms with an instrument which received unwanted calls and which, when touched by its owners, was generally found to be dead.

Growing families were an exception to this rule. With husbands away at the office, wives needed the phone to keep in touch with relatives, friends and neighbours. And when the wives had finished talking, it was the adolescent son’s or daughter’s turn to use the instrument. Phone lines were blocked for hours, despite the fact that at the time I’m speaking of, the 60s, the Indian telephone system functioned so erratically that it was generally regarded as one of the worst in the world.

That’s changed now and so have I. The telephone system has improved, at least in Mumbai, and since I work from home, I find I have to use the telephone a lot. I also confess to having telephonic conversations which sometimes last for an hour. In the 60s, whenever I was in India, they wouldn’t have lasted for more than 15 minutes.

By British standards of that time, 15 minutes would still be something of a record. In the 11 or so years I spent in Britain, I never met a single Britisher who liked the phone. If someone called you the conversation was brief; and if you called, you were made to feel that you’d called at the wrong time. Perhaps e-mail has changed all that.

Technological innovations are always difficult to live with when they are first introduced into the home. The telephone, from being an object of intrusion became an object of fascination and menace and now an object of desire and menace. Most of the art I know of which centres around the phone stems from the first period – the phone as an object of fascination and menace.

They are Menotti’a opera The Telephone, Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) in which a woman talks on the phone to a man we can’t hear – he turns out to be her lover who is using the phone to break off the relationship – and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

Interestingly, the February programme of Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts has a performance of a Marathi play called Hallo.

The programme note says the play is adapted and directed by Prasad Vanarase, though it doesn’t mention what it’s adapted from. The note also says that in the play, "a lonely, middle-aged man embarks upon the obsessive pastime of making telephone calls" and that the play "explores the issues of urbanisation, alienation and the collapse of traditional values." The phone as an object of fascination and menace....

Now it’s the turn of e-mail. Friends from abroad tell me to get that facility at any cost otherwise they can’t communicate with me. At the same time a report in The Times of India informs me that the "netizens" of Mumbai are unable to cope with a sudden invasion of hate-mail – mostly communal in nature.

(Talking of invasions, couriers have interrupted me three times in the course of my writing this article.) Gimme me back the old-time phone and postal service any time. Give me the old-time religion.

— Associated News Feautres