Good old world of landline phones

AN expression in vogue a few decades ago has become almost obsolete today — ‘dead phone’. In the good old days, a landline phone without a dial tone was considered ‘dead’. A complaint had to be lodged to revive it. After lodging the complaint, we used to pick up the instrument every 15 minutes to check the dial tone and bang it on the cradle in disgust if we didn’t hear any. And once the dial tone was restored, a wave of happiness ran through the household.

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A landline connection was no less than a status symbol in those days; every house did not have this facility. I remember knocking on the door of one neighbour or the other to use a phone in our locality in Shimla. One of them, a grumpy bureaucrat, used to make a trite excuse, ‘Oh dear, my phone has been dead for the past two days.’ But once, to his utter embarrassment, his lie was exposed. His phone started ringing just when he was closing the door on me.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell designed a device that could transmit and receive speech electrically. Today, he would surely be turning in his grave to find that his prized invention is on the verge of extinction. Communication has been revolutionised enormously in the current century. Cellular phones and the Internet have taken over the globe. Now we can speak across the world with a mere tap on our smartphone. But there was a time when we had to wait for hours together after booking a trunk call through a tele-exchange to talk to a person in a town a few hundred miles away. I recall the time in the early 1980s when I had to cultivate a friendship with an exchange operator in an obscure town of Himachal Pradesh so that I could speak to my wife living in Shimla. He was fond of booze and bawdy jokes. I had to offer him whiskey every fortnight and suffer his insipid jokes for the sake of my marital harmony. It was later that the STD facility was introduced in our country.

And then there was our phone adventure during our university days in the late 1970s. My hostel roommate went to his home in rural Punjab and returned after getting engaged to an NRI girl. Now he was burning with the desire to speak to his fiancée in London. An overseas call used to cost more than our subsistence allowance for the whole month. We thought about raising money by pooling among friends or taking a loan from the canteen contractor. Then, I noticed a telecom wire passing over our balcony roof. It was feeding the telephone installed in the hostel office downstairs. Arranging a telephone instrument and connecting it to that wire was not a difficult task for determined young men like us. The overseas trunk call was booked and when it was about to go through, my friend closeted himself along with the phone in a cupboard to prevent the sound of ringing or the loud conversation from reaching nearby rooms. He emerged after some time, perspiring profusely but sporting a victorious smile on his bearded face.