One of Bollywood’s greatest thespians was known to use his formidable acting skills to amuse himself when he was bored.
Often this involved pranks of various kinds —one of which was answering the phone himself — in the days when those damn things were black, bulbous and fixed to a wall.
The joke was that when people called to speak to him he’d impersonate a gauche and dim-witted domestic help. “It was a great insight into human nature,” he said to me in his celebrated dulcet mumble, “because I saw so bluntly how the same voices who were rude, brusque, dismissive and in a hurry when they spoke to me when I was ‘the servant’, could so swiftly become sweet, husky relaxed, seductive and polite when ‘I’ came on the line. It helped me tell the fakes from the genuine ones.”
These days, of course, the advances in telecommunication afford us many more ways to display our bad manners.
The first, of course, is the golden rule of crassness: “Have mobile, will call.”
Even after all these years, I am still amazed that people, completely unsolicited, will call someone they hardly know and have never met in their lives for the most trivial reasons, with no thought for the time of day or the situation the receiver might be in.
People call you on your mobile to ask you for your address, invite you to an event, sell you something or for a favour, when you might be driving, ill, at someone’s bedside, asleep, abroad or in a meeting. You could be bungee-jumping, for all they care.
It does not occur to them that they can text whatever they have to convey with a greater chance of getting their message across clearly, and without annoying you in the bargain.
As far as I’m concerned, the most important and longed-for three words in our quotidian lives today are in an SMS that say “May I call?”
But perhaps texting before you talk is a concept way too freaky for most people. Texting, after all, is reserved for the all-important acts of forwarding unfunny jokes, insincere festival greetings, banalities passed off as wisdom, spurious superstitions, tepid flirtations and — of course — all-encompassing spam. With so much on their fingers, who has the time to text: “May I call?”
But even after they have crossed the Rubicon of good manners and intruded on your time and space by calling you on your mobile phone to ask whether you’ve received the invitation to an event you wouldn’t dream of attending, you can bet that it will not occur to them to utter the second most essential words in the lexicon of mobile telephony: “Is this a good time to talk?”
No, sir. You could be hanging upside-down and by the skin of your teeth from the Rajabai Tower, dodging bullets in Bhiwandi or gasping for breath in the midst of an asthma attack, when the phone will ring, and your friendly neighborhood insurance salesman will launch into a sales spiel that lasts longer than you have left to live — given your high blood pressure and stress levels.
As far as I’m concerned, the sweetest three words today are not “I love you”, but “May I call?” and “Can you talk?”
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com
