I Want A Dumb Phone

In this era of smart phones I want to take a step backwards and I want to get a dumb phone now. What is the reason? There are numerous…

The first thing I do when I get up is to checks for wats app or facebook messages, and emails. If one thinks seriously, what is usefulness of those messages? The ratio of useful to useless messages would be 20% to 80%. Is it really worth to take so much of trouble to tolerate those 80% messages for the 20% good ones? The day starts with some nonsense good morning with pics of birds, trees, grass or tea cups. Then there are tens of useless jokes sent in the night by the late latifs, which you have to go through. Then there are tens of emails looking up at me.The crazy part is that now my boss expects me to respond to the “urgent” emails from my phone, which earlier used to wait till I reach office. On top of it, now my responsible-ness is evaluated on this parameter.

Nowadays we unknowingly land up looking at the screen of our smart phone more often than the faces of dear ones around us. I feel ashamed of myself when I realize that while talking to my elderly grandpa and grandma, I was scrolling through the useless messages when they were looking at me, thinking I was busy with something important. The people like them who are unable to cope up with the speed of technological advancement due to their learning limitations and economical reasons, really feel left out, And that too without a valid reason.

These days friends in wats app groups get a lot of pics of an event when the event is going on. Then on top of it all the people post comments like wow, cute, amazing, blah, blah, blah… And the pics are forgotten while scrolling down so are the memories. Even if these get downloaded onto your phone, you have to clear them off in a few days to make space for new ones. In good old days of camera with roll of a strip of photo film the pics used to get printed onto a nice glossy paper. They were precious memories. Even today we feel like leaving those moments when we hold them in our hands.

The batteries of these smart phones are so dumb that they need charging daily. I feel this is nothing but the money making strategy of the manufacturers. If you want more battery life, put in more money. The good old phones used to go on for 3-4 days without charging. If by chance you forget to charge your phone and go out to work then your dear ones are ready to first worry a lot about you and then to fight with you and to tag you as a careless person. This is not fare!! A smart phone cannot prove me dumb.

The internet is a mandatory thing for thes phones. They are again dumb without internet. The net packs are meant to snatch away more and more money from your pockets. Just imagine, these telecom companies could afford to bribe our officers and ministers with such a huge loads of money and which necessarily a very minor part of their profits, then what will be scale of their earnings. You cannot count the numbers.

After spending much of your time with wats app messages, emails and pics, if some is still left then the attractive and addictive games are eagerly waiting to take that away. You don’t even realize that the time you had kept aside to say read a book or to make a call to your old uncle or a friend or simply to chit chat with your life partner is now taken away by the silly game.

Having said all this, I think the usefulness of the phone ends with the good old 1100 or something like that. The whole stuff of smartphones is a bubble of useless interactions with a silly machine. So I want a dumb phone… Apologies to myself for asking for a smartphone a few months ago…