Beeped Out

While watching Gangs of Wasseypur, I came across one of those rare comical scenes in an otherwise gritty marathon of a movie (in two parts) soaked in blood and gore, set in the badlands of Bihar/Jharkhand. The hero Nawazuddin Siddiqui flaunts a pager in a mofussil tapori fashion to impress his lady love Huma Qureshi.

I am sure many of the present day smartphone wielding hipsters may not have even heard about pagers. And many who saw the movie were seeing that matchbox like device for the first (and probably the last) time.

It was one of those electronic gadgets which died a premature death, thanks to the technologically superior mobile phone and a free fall in call and text message charges. The fact that one could  only receive messages and one had to call up the pager operator to send a message were major handicaps.

Back in the mid-1990s, it enjoyed a pride of place among the yuppies, almost on par with what an i-pad commands now. Company bigwigs and executives were doled out Motorola's pager sets (it had a monopoly in India) and it gave them a kick to wield them tucked to their belts. At public places a beep from a pager often used to draw admiring glances, often laced with envy.

However little did these executives realise that they were, in fact, falling prey to the first version of 'electronic handcuff' being applied on them by the corporates to ruin their free time and holidays. Later on that role was taken up by mobile phones, laptops, blackberries and i-pads. Remember Hrithik Roshan in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara?

The  introduction of mobile phones in the country did sound a alarm for pager operators, but the prohibitively high mobile phone call charges and handset costs was a cause of some comfort for them. Mobile phone initially was described as a rich man's toy and almost no communication expert back then saw it as a gamechanger in India as it later turned out to be.

The subsequent reduction in cell phone handset prices and call charges soon pushed down pagers to downmarket status. Pager beeps at public places started inviting scorn and derision.

I remember a pager dealer commenting in some magazine (don't recall which one) that earlier his clients used to be doctors, engineers, high class lawyers, but now he has plumbers, carpenters and automobile mechanics sign up as subscribers. I also recall a friend of mine saying, "If you have mobile phone, cool; if you do not have one, no problem; but if you have a pager, people will look down upon you."

Pager's death knell came when incoming calls on cell phones became free. After that it was a swift and steep slide to the e-waste bin of history.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat