II. Newlyweds Deepa and Saurabh recently moved to Mumbai. Deepa is captivated with the idea of creating a home like those of the “beautiful people” she’s always reading about in glossy magazines. Saurabh, a practical engineer, is not one to spend money on interior decoration. So Deepa creates her fantasy home with her own money, saved from before her marriage. When he asks how much she’s spent, she usually lies.
One day, Deepa goes to a closeout sale in Mumbai’s fashionable Bandhni district and gets a great deal on beautiful rugs and wallpaper. The prices are so low that, ironically, she ends up spending more than she’d planned. But then at least Saurabh will never know how much.
Suddenly, Deepa freezes. She’s just remembered that whenever she uses her credit card, her bank sends an instant message to her cell phone detailing transactions as a security measure. And she lent Saurabh her cell phone this morning because his was being repaired. At that very moment he could be reading how much she spent on decoration today, and worse yet, how much she’d actually been spending over the months...
III. Young Raju lives with his mother, sister, younger brother, grandparents, two aunts, and five cousins in Kunjipur, a large rural village in the northern state of Uttar
Pradesh. Like many men from the region, Raju’s father and two uncles support their families by working in the Middle East. Most houses in Kunjipur don’t have landline phones, nor do Kunjipuris own cell phones. There is one public phone booth in the village square.
The family has just received some interesting cards from the bank, one for his mother and one for each of his aunts. Raju’s father had explained that these cards, which hardly anyone in the village had ever seen before, much less used, would enable them to get money from the state bank whenever they needed it. The family will no longer have to wait for Raju’s father and uncles to risk bringing cash with them on their long trips back home.
As the only literate member of the household, Raju is entrusted with the cards. The accompanying letters tell him that there is a number he needs to have, a “PIN,” before they can use the cards. At that moment “Postman Uncle” rides up on his bicycle. The affable mail carrier is like a member of the family. Since Raju had learned to read, Postman Uncle no longer has to write letters for the family, but he now carries with him a mobile phone as part of a new government campaign for villages with inadequate landlines.
Postman Uncle dials Raju’s father
and hands Raju the phone. Raju’s father tells him that for security, he’ll send a text message with the PIN numbers. Voila! A series of numbers appears for each card.
Raju feels like a maharaja with his three cards. All three families now depend on him to get the money from the bank. What power! His mind whirls with at the possibilities: Perhaps his mother and aunts will give him a small gratuity for the service, or maybe, just maybe, he should simply take it for himself. Meanwhile, Postman Uncle pedals on to the next house, puffed up with a sense of pride and importance. His cell phone had been the conduit to important information that enabled groundbreaking new technology. When he shows all the neighbors the numbers Raju’s father sent, everyone will know how important a person Postman Uncle really is…
Plunged into the mobile-phone revolution, the characters in these stories have run smack into their own culture’s dominant characteristics.
In India, as in most of Asia, society, groups, and families are valued over individual members. Space, objects, and technology are very often shared. Social sci-
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