Chocolat

It's been 2 years now since Gunti and I enrolled in a Verizon contract. I remember voraciously sieving through the Internet in search of a phone set that would stand apart elegantly in a sorry crowd of sluggish, feature overladen mobiles who had the stylistic sensibilities of Frank Zappa on a late night talk show. I wanted a Carla Bruni in a world infested with the likes of Pratibha Patil who doddered and tottered and hobbled and toddled in a senile dance of outmodishness. I sneered at the antiquated anorexia of the Motorola Razr and jeered at the jarring sophistication of the Nokias. It was a time when the world seemed full of possibilities, when the blood was hot and the heart was sanguine, and eyes with that twinkle of possibilities were fixed far out onto the horizon where a new day was struggling to break free from the clutches of darkness... Well, maybe I have become more emotional than the situation demands but it's our loss that we underrate superficiality so much, a topic that we shall leave for some other time, some other day. For the time being, my eyes got fixated on this new model that LG had very geekily and unimaginatively named 'VX8500'. They had a nickname for it too. And I am slightly flushed to admit that in all their campy incompetence, LG nicknamed it 'Chocolate'. Which didn't make sense at all since the phone came only in black. I just wished they were not referring to it's taste. At that time though, the only thing that mattered to me was its seductively glossy screen which lit up in red to reveal a touchpad when you slid it open. What else, I thought, would anyone need in a phone ? Huh.

The phone, I must admit, had a prodigious disposition to begin with and I should have understood then that any effort to tame this wild beast would be an exercise in futility. It had far too much personality to begin with. You see, it had a touchpad as I have mentioned before and not a very good one at that. You slide it open to activate it and all hell breaks loose. The phone, in the hands of a novice, has a tendency of taking him for a nasty ride. It's a bit like Microsoft word. Show them a gesture even slightly miscalculated and they would bite back and take your head off. At the very least they would make you regret your birth. Even today, the matter of actually succeeding in calling the number that you intended can only be discussed in the hushed voices of probabilities. Taking the photo that you desire is asking for too much really. My phone follows the Hindu philosophy in the sense that you can activate the camera but you should not expect it to fire at the right time. It has Heisenbergity inbuilt. I was quite content in playing the second fiddle, you know the stupid sidekick to the hero that is my phone as long as it allowed me to get on the wireless network every now and then. And in the infinite generosity of its magnanimous self, it indeed has allowed me this privilege over the last couple of years. Things have taken a turn for worse though and it is quite evident that a bloody struggle is in offing.

It all started a month ago when my phone, one fine morning, decided to deactivate the 'Cancel' button. Permanently. Now I could not go back. Phone menus became unidirectional and grammatically correct text messages, almost an impossibility. The only way to end a call was to slide the phone back in. A few days later, upon opening the 'Contacts' list my phone started scrolling down ad-infinitum. And I thought: Owwwww! how sweet. It was almost an amusement. It was only a few days back on a sinister moonless night while walking back to home that I realized its menacing plan. I slid it open, went to the 'Recent Calls' and the next thing I see, my phone is happily calling the first number in the list. I hastily disconnected it, tried it again and the same result. Next time, I went to the 'Contacts' list and upon finding itself here my phone promptly went into it's scroll mode and to my bulging eyes, stopped at my adviser's number, probably gave a derisive chuckle, and started calling. I slid it in hoping that it would end the deluge. My phone, waited for a bit in this deactivated position, suddenly woke up with it's touchpad all red with baleful energy, opened the 'Recent Calls' list and started dialing the most recent one, again my adviser. I tried shutting it down with the master switch but it conveniently ignored the commands of the most powerful button and finally I had to take off the battery. For the first time, I was happy that we have not seen the invention of wireless power yet.

Things have gone worse still. It doesn't show me if I've got any new voicemails (which is fine I guess :)). And only today, it didn't show me at least 2 missed calls which I distinctly heard from the next room. Frankly speaking, I didn't even know that so many things could go wrong with one phone until they did with mine. And I still do not know the surprises that fate has for me. Maybe it will start giving me electric shocks. I am afraid of the day when it grows a set of pointed teeth and chews my ear off. If there is one thing I have learned in these last two years, it's that, like Bauna Vaman (for those who get the reference), my phone always has one trick left up it's sleeve.