Next Generation Mobile Love!!

Dedicated to all my friends in love and me on call waiting.

Technology has redefined many aspects of our life – From hand-washing to Washing machines, Dish washing to dishwashers, cooked to micro-waved food and a little device in our hand called Mobile from Pigeon mails & love letters.

I reflect back to a hit movie of our times (don’t think am very old), which had shown a white pigeon as a symbol of love where it did a free job of exchanging messages. It was also recognized as an indicator to the heroin that her hero is thinking about her. So was the irony of love a few years ago. We still had phone then, but the calling rates were quite high, so most of the people stuck to letters. I still remember the trend of pen friends, where two unknown people became friends by sending letters, which eventually made some meet the love of their life.

I often gather around my aunts to hear their stories of marriage and back to when they got engaged. Love was a forbidden word in their times and most of them had arranged marriages. (which actually has now become a forbidden word to many). One aunt told me, after their engagement uncle gave a call at her office and her boss called her to attend the phone. Yes they just had a phone next to her boss’s seat. (Love to imagine you attending a phone in your Reporting manager’s cabin ). Her face got pale with panic and her hands trembled while saying the first hello. Her boss was thoroughly concerned and doubting that everything was fine and even checked with a colleague who told her she is engaged and then Boss had a sigh of relief!!. Such was the beauty of love and relationships in those times, where people longed to talk, wrote letters to express their feelings and waited for ages to meet.

Zooming back from those days to these, pen friends have been replaced with cryptic key board friends who use the QWERTY/NON QWERTY key boards to quickly type the lovey dovey messages or forward messages. Postal departments around the world have moved away their business model from selling stamps and handling letters to Saving Schemes. And bosses don’t dare to peak into a phone which is received even while in a meeting.

Love of your life is always online through SMS, emails and messengers in phone. Love birds have ample time to discuss what they have eaten, what they are wearing and what they felt when a colleague mocked at her hair today. While 24x7 news channels still stick to the top stories, our love birds discuss the minutest details of every minute which they have spent without them. Mobile has become as precious a commodity as food to survive. I have seen people who don’t panic if their wallets are snatched but are more concerned if their phone is left at home.

For many the definition of love goes wrong if he/she didn’t pick up the call when he/she was busy with work. For some, love is more about a status check on their partners to make sure he/she is not with some one else. Facebook/orkut profiles of partners are actively monitored for new messages/scraps and status updates.

Love earlier was a thing to preserve which now seems to become a necessity to maintain a comparative mobile bill between friends and compare “Mera BF tere BF se smart kaise”. People earlier used to discover each other when they started living together, unfolding the secrets of other persons nature one at a time, always amazed with his/her reaction on a romantic journey together, his/her reaction when either got hurt etc. But today, even in arranged marriages, I see people talking from the minute they get engaged to the marriage day. Expectations are already set about each other and they know so much about each other already, that nothing much is there to explore further(especially for long dating couples).

I often wonder, has this constant communication lead to a increasing rate of divorces in the world, the number of breakups in early relationships, the number of heart breaks, suicides and of course emergence of new mobile service providers.

Is love more about calling many times a day to check what we are doing/feeling or is love still a feeling which makes you smile when you think of that someone special!!