Free Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India by Robin Jeffrey

PREFACE
    ‘Who did you writethis book for?’ a publisher asked us. ‘Ourselves’, we replied with as close to one voice as possible, given that Doron was in Australia and Jeffrey in Singapore. But it was true: this is the book we both were looking for in 2008 when the puzzle—the miracle, the in-your-faced-ness—of Indian mobile telephony began to strike us every day.
    Each of us was teased by memorable first encounters with Indian telephones. For Jeffrey, it was the marriage of two Canadians in New Delhi on a sunny Saturday afternoon in December 1967. After the ceremony, a reception was held in the grounds of a grand old New Delhi bungalow, then occupied by a senior member of the Canadian High Commission. From mid-afternoon, attempts were made to telephone the parents of the bride and groom in Toronto. The project came to resemble a disaster-rescue saga. Occasionally, the person placing the call—we took it in shifts—would break into the conviviality with an announcement: ‘We nearly got through that time. I think I heard someone pick up … but it may have been another operator … Our operator says perhaps in an hour’. Darkness fell, eventually the party broke up, and the call was never completed. That experience was one of the few times Jeffrey had any connection with a telephone during two years in India between 1967 and 1969. The school where he taught in Chandigarh was believed to have a phone, rumoured to be in the principal’s office, but no teacher had ever heard it ring or heard that it had been used. No one Jeffrey knew had a phone or thought of using one. What, after all, were bicycles, social visits and Indian Post and Telegraphs (IP&T) for?
    For Doron,arriving in India twenty-five years later, an encounter with a telephone was steeped in anxiety and anticipation. As a backpacker in the early 1990s, he soon realised he had to have a plan prior to entering one of the yellow-painted STD booths—the ‘PCOs’ or Public Call Offices—on the street. Preparation involved making sure that all important information was communicated to those at the other end of the line in the most succinct and powerful manner. This was vital because the line was often cut and costs were high: a day’s sustenance—Rs 300—was the cost of a minimum three-minute call. 1 Doron anxiously watched the red-digits displaying the mounting seconds on the electronic clock as he screamed into the mouthpiece in the hope that his voice would carry over the radiowaves to faraway lands. One could easily blow a whole day’s budget on a single botched call. Unfortunately, all too often the phone conversations in those bright yellow booths ended with an argument over the price and quality of the call. The experience could be unpleasant. For Doron, visiting the local post office to send postcards and sift leisurely through the post-restante mail was the preferred way to communicate with family and friends.
    In the first decade of the twenty-first century, all this changed. The take-up of cell phones from 2004 was rocket-like. (We use ‘cell phone’ and ‘mobile phone’ interchangeably). By 2012, mobile-phone subscribers in India exceeded 900 million out of a total population of 1,220 million (1.22 billion). On those numbers, three out of every four Indians, from kids to octogenarians, had a mobile phone. And even if we don’t take the 900 million figure too seriously (there is a lot of double-counting), and even when we recognise that phones are much less common among rural poor people than urban rich ones, it means that close to half of Indians almost certainly owned a phone. Doron and Jeffrey were like millions of others who came to marvel at daily encounters with these facts and to add to their story-telling repertoire tales that began: ‘The rickshaw guy the other night … he was pedalling me home and his phone rang! He stopped and told me to get out—he couldn’t take me any farther. His wife wanted him to do another