Sorry, Wrong Number

Treść źródłowa

In 1984, the year I was born, 0.4 of 100 Indians had a fixed phone line. Today, there are 85 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 Indians. But even this statistic doesn’t quite capture the transformation I have witnessed in my lifetime. In the eighties, when we called relatives long distance, we had to book a “trunk call” and a manual phone operator - a government employee - would connect us. It took forever to connect, the call dropped often, the line quality was poor, and we yelled just to be heard. Until last year, my then 103-year-old, now late grandfather spoke louder when I called him from the US. I have had more than one hilarious chat with a wrong number, and overheard at least one crossed connection in my teenage years.These problems were so common, that misbehaving phones found their way into Indian movies. The most famous example from my childhood is from the 1987 movie Mr. India, where Annu Kapoor playing Mr. Gaitonde, editor of the Crimes of India, has a phone so dysfunctional it became a character in the film. And writers Salim-Javed, masters of setting up characters, introduce Gaitonde and his phone through a series of wrong numbers.This was not the only nod to the controlled political economy of the eighties in Mr. India. The unsavory characters (Daga, Teja, Wolcott) were gold smugglers at a time when gold, foreign exchange, and imports were tightly controlled. And thanks to price and quantity controls on essential commodities, even the local grocer in the movie (Roopchand) was a small time villain and involved with the big time smugglers in black markets of g…