My beautiful red telephone

I "knew all about telephones" before going to school. I only needed two cigarette cans (holding 50 sticks, available in those days) and a long piece of string attached to the bottom of each. On the other side I tried to find a volunteer, usually my younger sister, listening to me or speaking, by turns. I think I got the idea from one of the contemporary children's magazines. It was great fun, but soon people began to avoid me, because they had run out of words to speak to a five-year-old.

My father, the Editor of a leading national daily, got his first telephone around 1957, i.e. after serving in his position for many years, because the owner of his paper, a highly intelligent barrister politician, was very careful about spending money. The Editor never got an office car either. By an irony of fate, after Liberation, when the owner found himself stranded in Pakistan, the employees (with a different Editor), began to run the show, and got more or less whatever benefits they desired.

In 1981 I got my first landphone. In those days of no cellphones, the employees of T&T earned their wealth by giving quick approvals to the applications of people willing to pay extra large sums of money, and nonpayers sometimes had to wait ten years before their turn came ("sorry, there is no cable in your area"). My brilliant classmate at school and college, Abul Fazal Muhammad Nazmul Hossain Chowdhury (the longest name I have encountered in my life, a cousin of politicians Saber Hossain Chowdhury and Salahuddin Qader Chowdhury) who was an exceptionally honest Divisional Engineer in T&T (later Chairman) got it done in a week. However, the local lineman used to put it out of order every month and even after informing Nazmul I had to pay this man a bakhshish of 100 takas (quite a lot in those days) to bring my line back into service. I myself had little use for it, but as the more popular member of the family needed to talk to her family and friends, I had no choice but to suffer this perennial headache. On one occasion, Nazmul was transferred elsewhere and when I wanted to talk to the new DE about my chronic problems, his PA told me curtly that the DE was too busy to talk to nonentities like university professors. The Minister in-charge of T&T was always one of the richest in the cabinet and was inevitably a favourite of the head of the government.

T&T landphone continued its outlandish tyranny even when the cellphone age arrived. With a monopoly given to Citycell, who decided to cater only to a high-end market, the price of mobiles remained outside the buying power of all but the filthy rich. T&T had no competition.

Dr Yunus, though a scholar of the social sciences, had a fascination for modern technology (he was the science adviser in the first caretaker government, and the maze of Grameen affiliates have many technological components). He promised to provide poor villagers with cellphones at Tk 5000 a piece, and as he is a persuasive speaker, as soon as the Citycell monopoly era ended, he managed to get a permit from the government for a Norwegian telecom company to build up the first and still the leading, countrywide mobile service network of the country, though not quite at the price he had promised (like his interest rates of Grameen Bank). The margin between Dr Yunus' initial calculations and the actual rate offered by Grameen must have profited some people extravagantly. It always helps in networking enterprises to have an early lead, and Grameen made the best of it. The invisible hand of a free market was nowhere to be seen and rates were fixed by cartels. Nevertheless, at last nonentities like university professors could breathe relief. Today even the domestic help communicates her inability to come on random days using her own phone.

When I returned to my paternal home after many years in Dhaka University accommodation, I had to get some papers signed by the DE at Nilkhet Exchange to transfer my landphone. I found him pathetically idle, reading the cine pages of  newspapers. There were no problems in installing it back in Dhanmondi, though I was not sure exactly what purpose it would serve. Then the phone went dead within a couple of weeks. I made four complaints to the BTCL, threatening even action from the new Minister of BTCL, who knew the principal phone user at my home very well, and had promised to come to our rescue if there was any problem. Nothing happened. The executives, shorn of their past glory, had gone into a state of stupor. The bills charging me about 200 takas line rent kept coming regularly. Eventually one day, it came alive again, after our old lineman re-appeared. I marvelled at the acute business sense of this semi-literate man. He had worked out in his mind that anybody who keeps paying 200 takas a month for no service at all could be fleeced like olden times a reasonable amount for some minimal service. A niche market has been created, where the lineman rules supreme, whereas the bosses remain sullen unimaginative defeatists.

I went to New Market and for the newly active landline bought a beautiful red phone for only Tk.600. Seven days later it was dead again. Land telephones, white, black or red, are not meant to communicate; they are showpieces and cost 200 taka a month for the privilege.

Smart people use smart phones. I am not smart. My Tk 5000 mobile phone (I have stuck to Dr. Yunus' figure) cannot do all the tricks that phones costing Tk 67,000 can. But I have had so many smart students in life, some of whom have worked even in the Bell (after Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor) Labs, I hope one day somebody can invent a phone that will change the contents of any conversation to an intelligent, or at least intelligible form. But I wish more ardently that one day the people of this country will only elect smart people who will not need any red telephones.

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Ahmed Shafee is a physicist.