(Ting) ting .. ting

It's Thursday folks. The pre-weekend opener.

That sophisticated brain jelly of yours has started to explore, walking through mental souq alleys of 'Oh, What shall I eat?' or better yet, 'Where should I travel to?.' All of these questions and one device that dictates them.

Life has come to this, where our hunger is controlled by the Delivery apps. PING. Your phone has just notified, the latest office picks are available for 50% off and suggests pizza might be the best choice for all of us. Yep, all because of the device of solace : The mobile phone.

While you contemplate these final hours of office, I would like to bring some food for thought.

Let me transport you to an era before mobile phones, when life had its peculiar quirks and contraptions. Each a character in the grand drama of daily living. If you’re young enough to think 'pager' is a verb and 'rotary dial' sounds like a medieval torture device, prepare to be enlightened. And if you’re old enough to have used either, well, here’s your nostalgia trip.

Remember .. Pagers? Little black boxes clipped to belts, beeping insistently. When they went off in public, the wearer .. usually a sales executive or a boss who loved the sound of their own importance, would whip it out and frown at the tiny screen. The expression was a mix of Sitcom tragedy and bureaucratic disdain. “Ah,” it seemed to say, “the world needs me. Again.” And off they’d march to the nearest telephone, leaving the rest of us peasants to wonder what crucial corporate emergency required such urgency.

Then, there's the telephone. Not the slim, glowing slab you hold now but a sturdy, rotary-dial fortress of patience. Dialing a number was a full workout for your finger, and if you got one digit wrong, back to square one. The truly wealthy had answering machines, which made them feel like movie stars. The rest of us had to actually answer the phone. Barbaric, eh?

And mornings! No soothing “ding-ding-ding” from a smartphone alarm. Instead, a round alarm clock would sit smugly by your bed, waiting to jolt you awake with an ear-splitting BRRRRING! There was no snooze button; you simply smacked it into submission. That clock bore the scars of many such battles.. yet it always came back for more.

Even .. Music was a ritual. You didn’t just 'hit play'. You operated a system: a towering contraption .. with a CD player, cassette deck, radio, and EQ sliders. If you were lucky enough to visit the Gulf (Middle East), you returned home with a shiny two-in-one . .commonly referred to Hi-Fi's, a prized possession for serenading Whitney houston or grooving to Boney M. What about going to the cinemas? You dressed up and went to a theatre. Watching at home meant shelling out for a VCR (or a VCP, if you were frugal). Later, the truly posh among us graduated to DVD players.

Photography was a discipline, not a pastime. You pondered lenses, calculated shutter speeds, and prayed the photo lab didn’t botch your precious roll of film. The rich splurged on Sony handy-cams, turning family events into overproduced sagas. And oh, the drama of dressing up for the camera. You in your best outfit, your widest smile and that deepest insecurity about your double chin.

Then there were the random street encounters. Strangers would cheerfully tap you on the shoulder and gesture toward your wrist. “Hey, Whats the time?” And just like that, your watch became a social utility.

Books, letters, cinema queues, STD booths (PCO telephone booths).. all of it vanished when the mobile phone arrived.

Oh, I remember the excitement when my father got his Nokia banana phone with its pull-out aerial. Us, children, would make endless calls, not because we had anything to say but to demonstrate our technological superiority to relatives. “Look, Mummy, no wires!” We strutted around like Kings who’d just conquered modernity.

We thought we were stepping into the future. What we didn’t realize was that we were stomping out entire ways of life. The mobile phone swallowed everything: alarms, cameras, music systems, bookshelves, theatres, even the humble wristwatch. No more pencils to rescue jammed cassette tapes. No more yelling at alarm clocks. No more scratching your head over shutter speeds or fiddling with EQ faders. One sleek device killed them all.

And now? There’s no going back. No one makes cassette players or VCRs anymore. The rewind button has vanished .. both literally and metaphorically.

The irony, of course, is that while the mobile phone has made life easier, it’s also made it infinitely busier. No? We’ve traded quirks for convenience, rituals for efficiency. And maybe, just maybe, we lost something charming along the way. But who has the time to think about that?

My phone’s beeping.

.. Someone needs me ...

.. Again.