Nokia 3310: From Cool Gadget to Dead Weight

Sigh! This picture of mine is now doing rounds in Facebook, much to the amusement of smartphone generation. Though it pains me a lot but can't blame them. After all the cool quotient of a gadget has a very short lifespan - barely a couple of years if one is lucky, and I count myself as one.

Nearly a decade ago I was a hot property and the darling of every dude and wannabes. My parent company Nokia ruled the airwaves and was living up to its ad slogan ‘connecting people’.

And I was the face of its success. My sleek antenna-less exterior appealed a lot to the hipsters, who were graduating out of primitive pagers. My sturdy exterior was an added plus as these teeny boppers are very careless when it comes to handling gadgets.

When I entered the Indian market, the cell phone call charges were hovering at Rs 14/minute and even incoming calls were being charged, plus the customs authorities were extracting their pound of flesh through duties. Hence the early sales reports were not very encouraging.

But once the call charges started plunging and incoming calls became free, there was no looking back. I became the most happening handset in the regular, grey and even the second hand markets. Gradually the customs duty too got reduced and the grey market began losing its sheen.

In a country where the landline penetration was abysmal and one had to wait for years to get a connection - and that too after greasing many palms, our entry was a great liberator and leveller. As the cell phone penetration started increasing I started figuring in the resale market and began entering homes where basic amenities like toilets and running water were non-existent and a landline phone was even beyond the realm of fantasy.

People ranging from students to businessmen to senior citizens started exploring my dexterity. Even those who were not well versed in English used their own ingenuity to circumvent the handicap. They used code language to store numbers on their phones. Hence it was 'BB' for wife and 'DD' for sister. Similarly they also used their ingenuity to send text messages. The 'snake' game became quite popular especially among gurkhas employed to guard the apartments. They would while away their leisurely afternoons playing the game.

My nearest competitor was Samsung R220. Though its blue backlit display gave a futuristic feel, the external antenna betrayed a dated look. It was also perceived as not so good receiver of signals and was no match to my durability. The other competitor was of course my cousin - Nokia 3315. It somehow was not as good looking as myself (honestly I am not blowing my trumpet) and though it was lighter, it had a tacky plastic feel.

My sales started plummeting once phones with facilities such as FM radio and camera, notably Nokia 6610 and 6630 and later the N-series, started appearing in the market. The emergence of Moto Razr too caused a body blow to my popularity and I got relegated as a product confined to resale market.

The entry of Blackberry and other smart phones caught my parent company on the wrong foot and things were never the same again. First we started losing out in the higher end segment but later we got reduced to an also ran player in all the segments.

Now we have become a butt of ridicule and there are many jokes surrounding Nokia in general and myself in particular. The most popular one, which figured in the social networking site Reddit, has a photo of myself and an  iPhone. The caption below the iPhone image was “Falls to the floor/Break the screen” and below mine it was “Falls to the floor/Break the floor.”

 

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

IPL: Some Home Truths

Spot Fixing: A 20/20 version of match fixing. All you need to do is bowl a few lousy deliveries or as batsman you have two options. Either behave as if you need a microscope to see the ball or loft it under the delusion that laws of gravity have taken a sabbatical.

The Betrayed Billion: A coinage by TV newsmen who mistake hallucination for facts. They know that India's population is about a billion and cricket is a religion, but have deluded themselves to think all of them worship cricketers and take IPL seriously. The viewers very well know that this brand of cricket is at best a nautanki with a carnival fizz. It has little cricket but is loaded with 'fringe benefits' such as cheerleaders, well endowed hostesses with size zero knowledge of cricket and after match parties.

D-company: When a small kid's parent or someone dear dies he or she is told that their dear departed has become a star in the sky. Though Dawood Ibrahim is alive, for the Indian public he is many galaxies beyond the reach of the country's law enforcement machinery. Hence if any case gets linked to D-company, they know it will forever remain a mystery. The case dies an early natural death, notwithstanding Arnab Goswami's vocal cords, and its clerical remains are interred in a dusty file in some nondescript police station.

BCCI: In the 1970s there was a bank with the same acronym called Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). It was founded by a Pakistani Agha Hasan Abedi and based out of London. It went bust in early 1990s thanks to Ponzi schemes and other nefarious activities such as funding dictators and drug cartels. Many overseas Pakistanis lost their money. It later came to be known as Bank of Crooks and Criminals. Our Board Of Control For Cricket In India (BCCI) is only a shade better in the sense that they are great survivors. It is a private organisation with an iron curtain over its finances and beyond the purview of RTI. Hence it attracts avaricious politicians and industrialists, for whom the interest in the game is at best an afterthought. Sports Illustrated had in 2011 exposed spot fixing in IPL and 20/20 world cup, but the thick skinned BCCI bigwigs just winked and moved on. After all when many of the IPL franchisees (some of them run by BCCI members themselves) have dubious funding running into crores, why bother when some enterprising lads make piddling lakhs on the sly!

Main Beneficiaries: No you got it all wrong. It is not Harbhajan Singh or those hapless viewers for whom Sreesanth's simian antics make their spleen work overtime. It is our former Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal. This minister had the back on his wall over the bribery case involving his nephew. Little earlier it was the former air force chief over helicopter deal. Crores of rupees were involved in these cases and that too at the cost of public exchequer. For them this spot fixing scandal is godsend as the media has trained its guns elsewhere. 

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Contours of Naya Pakistan

These are heady times for Pakistan. For the first time since independence, the country managed to carry out a democratic transition from one government to another. It's truly an important milestone for the turmoil-ridden country, often in news for wrong reasons.

Even in the recently concluded elections the electorate had to brave Taliban threat, bomb blasts and other forms of violence. To their credit they turned out in large numbers and it was indeed a resounding setback to militant groups, who had dubbed elections and the democratic process itself as un-Islamic.

In the run up to polls a hung assembly was predicted by many pollsters. However as the elections neared Nawaz Sharif emerged as frontrunner. For this steel tycoon turned politician it is indeed a sweet revenge from being ingloriously ousted from power in a coup in 1999, by the then General Pervez Musharraf. The wily general too had put his hat on the electoral ring, but his dreams got short circuited by the ghosts of his misdeeds as military ruler. The Pakistani Supreme Court ensured that he remained entangled in court cases, rather than court the electorate.

Sharif belongs to a family of steel mill owners and entered politics as a protege of General Zia-ul-Haq. It is said that his main motivation to join politics was nationalisation of steel plants by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Those days nationalisation was considered quite cool; in India too Indira Gandhi had nationalised banks.

His last tenure was marked with the dramatic bus diplomacy with India, which generated lot of euphoria on both sides and was equated with subcontinent's 'Berlin wall' moment. But unfortunately the thaw was short lived and got undone by a war on the icy heights of Kargil. This time around also Sharif has put peace with India a top priority, and one can only hope it does not get scuttled. The sub continent is home to people with one of the lowest per capita income and abysmal social indicators and hence can ill afford fratricidal conflicts.

This election also witnessed the emergence of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan out of fringes to become a major force. He caught the popular imagination of the public, especially the middle class and the youth and drew huge crowds during his public meetings. Though he promised to generate a 'tsunami' during the hustings, his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf failed to reach anywhere near the tally of Sharif's party. However, it will be wrong to dismiss him as 'storm in a teacup' (as some critics had done) because he managed to strongly undercut the ruling PPP's voter base.

Moreover, his PTI managed to emerge as single largest party at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province ridden with Taliban militancy. His strong anti-US stance and promise to end drone attacks has paid rich dividends. But it remains to be seen how his party is going to deliver on such promises.

The biggest loser of this election was the ruling Pakistan People's Party. The anti-incumbency and lack of a charismatic leader like late Benazir Bhutto has cost the party dear. It entered the poll fray with hardly any zest and seemed gripped by a death wish right from the word go. Even many of its prominent leaders had to bite the dust in the elections.

 Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Mumbai's Gangland Tales

Reading Dongri to Dubai by S Hussain Zaidi was like going through a guided tour of the evolution of organized crime in Mumbai. However my attempt here is not to do any formal review of the book, but recount some of the interesting nuggets in the bygone era.

When the country became independent it had espoused a brand of Fabian socialism, which later came to be known as Nehruvian socialism. The country was to be developed according to five year plans with emphasis on the public sector. The 'blood sucking' capitalists (some of them actually lived up to that reputation) were to be restricted using licence permit raj.

Another major credo of the Indian Government back then was 'self reliance' and hence goods produced by local manufacturers were to be encouraged and protected using prohibitively high customs duty on imported goods. During the Indira Gandhi era it was succinctly expressed in a slogan 'Be Indian, Buy Indian'. To be fair to them the import duty was there even during the British era, but the Indian government honed it as a potent weapon to earn revenue and keep the native manufacturing units ticking.

Hence the Indian middle class had to make do with electronic goods, vehicles and consumer products manufactured within the shores of the country. As for consumer electronic goods such as radio, record players, cassette tape recorders (both reduced to museum pieces in this pen-drive era) and watches the technology used by domestic manufacturers were quite primitive, when compared with their German and Japanese counterparts. There were also many fly-by-night operators who took customers for a ride by pawning of fake versions of globally famous brands like Phillips and later Sony.

All this only whetted the appetite for 'phoren' products and ripened the prospects of a grey market. Smuggling in independent India started off as means of undercutting the import duty. One of the early pioneers who thought on these lines was Haji Mastan. He felt if he can bring in these goods without paying import duty, he can make a huge profit. As a justification for all this he professed that import duty was relic of British India and hence need not be respected. He went on to capture India's imagination and even acted as muse to many of the Bollywood script writers.

Similarly as part of this austerity mantra the import of gold was restricted. But for Indian household the lure of gold has been second nature and cuts across all class barriers and even eras. Even today it is a major bugbear for finance ministry mandarins battling with the country's runaway import bills. So to satiate this craving the smuggling of gold began and soon it proved many times more lucrative than electronic goods.

---

Haji Mastan rose to prominence when the organised crime in Mumbai was at its age of innocence - when there was little khoon kharaba and gang wars meant only fisticuffs and knife fights. Mastan himself was too suave for all this and had outsourced this function to guys like Varadarajan Mudaliar and Karim Lala.

But for his stint in jail around Emergency period, this dock-worker-turned-smuggler was fortunate enough to enjoy the riches he had aspired for (had a Merc and lived in plush South Bombay locality) and even got the luxury of retiring from crime. He later went on to give interviews to mainstream newspapers and magazines like any public figure.

This is something none of his successors could achieve. Their lives remained stuck in the mean streets of Dongri and Byculla (or holed up in places like Dubai and Bangkok) and they often gave up the ghost to the bullets of either rival gangs or the police. These gangland wars got meaner and bloody and reached its gory climax during the infamous shootout at Lokhandwala. They also acquired a communal colour after the Babri Masjid demolition riots.

---

The day Dawaood's brother Sabir died in a shootout in 1981 he was romancing with his paramour in a Premier Padmini Fiat. It was the same year when Maruti Suzuki rolled out its first car, which later proved to be a game changer and thoroughly overhauled the carscape on Indian streets. Nowadays apart from some rickety old taxis in Mumbai, Premier Padmini has for all purposes been banished from Indian roads.

---

Lastly during my stay at Mumbai I had often heard about the Congress House (located near Grant Road station)  and the notoriety associated with it, though never bothered to know how that place got such a name. It seems the place had seen nobler days in the past. During the days of freedom struggle Congress stalwarts had set up base there. However by 1970s it became a haven for modern day slavery - flesh trade. 

Also Read: Bangalore Beat