The Missed Call: India’s Lifeline

I seriously doubt if Sunita (name changed) has ever made a call on her mobile. Every single time she picks up the phone and makes a call, it is a ‘missed call’, the Great Indian Innovation. For some reason which is still a mystery to me, her particular brand of missed call would be so brief that bat an eyelid and you would actually ‘miss’ it. Just a single tinkle of your hello tune which, if you are not close enough or attentive enough to your mobile, you are more than likely to miss. But you are supposed to not only not miss the solitary beep, but call back within minutes, if not seconds. And once you call, she would just not stop. An average conversation with her lasts between 25 to 40 minutes. The cost is all yours, but the pleasure all hers! Thoroughly disgusted with this very irritating habit of Sunita, my wife stopped responding to her missed calls. Lo and behold! The missed calls simply stopped coming! Much to the relief of my wife, I must add.
The ‘missed call’ – and not the Great Indian Railways or Indian Post – is the true lifeline of India. The range of uses it is put to is truly breathtaking. You are waiting for the car. The driver gives you a missed call. You understand that he has arrived and rush downstairs. If that sounds a little too elitist, let us choose a more ‘aam admi’ example. The neighbourhood rickshawala who ferries your child to school gives a missed call and you realize it is time for your child to rush out. You get down from a bus, give a missed call to someone and s/he lands there in minutes to pick you up. I have absolutely no doubt that every reader of this piece can, from his or her own experience, list dozens of ways in which the missed call is used.
This kind of use of the missed call is based on sound economics and sound practical sense. After all, why do you need to spend, even if it is only a few paisa, when you can get what you want done with just a missed call? No wonder users of this kind of need-based missed calls form the overwhelming majority. But there are also those who use the missed call not to save their money, but that of others. Like this Good Samaritan friend of mine, who has asked his office peon to give him a missed call whenever he needs to speak to him. He would call back – to save a few paise from the peon’s mobile bill!
When it comes to creative use of the missed call, you have to hand it to the new age youth. Recently, I was aghast to hear that a 20-something youth has had 10/12 affairs – all of them born out of ‘missed calls’ (out of responding to ‘missed calls’, to be more precise). If the guy who narrated this to me - with the Casanova blushing like a coy bride throughout – is too be believed, there are apparently ‘hundreds’ of girls and boys scouring the airwaves through the proven path of the missed call for a virtual affair which may or may not transform into a real affair. I would have dismissed the whole story as so much hogwash had it not been for a story that I had read just days before on the front page of a leading Odia daily. A young couple had fallen in ‘missed call love’ and decided to come to Bhubaneswar and marry. The marriage solemnized (in a temple, where else?), the couple stayed in a lodge. On the fourth day, the boy told the girl her mother had suddenly taken ill and he had to rush. He promised to return by evening but never did. Desperate calls by the girl to the number that had been instrumental in the birth of their affair elicited the ‘switched off’ answer. Shattered, she went to the Mahila police station and that is how the whole thing came to light.
For every single way of using the missed call, there are at least ten different ways of misusing or abusing it. A friend’s wife had a harrowing experience for about a week after she committed the cardinal error of calling back after receiving a missed call on her mobile. The voice at the other end belonged to a young man, who kept pestering her with professions of love though dozens of missed calls a day, without realising that the lady she was proposing to was perhaps old enough to be her mother! Her husband, however, played spoilsport, ending the Cupid-struck boy’s short-lived dalliance with a mouthful on day.
Personally speaking, I am not a big fan of this business of the missed call. To be honest, I positively detest it. But I shudder to think of the day when the missed calls would be chargeable. I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the whole nation would rise against it like never before, not even during the brief euphoria of the Anna Hazare movement last year. The UPA government survived the Anna wave. But I doubt if can withstand the missed call avalanche if it were to make it a paid service.
May be the UPA government knows that already. May be that is why it has, despite a supposedly reformist Prime Minister, never paid any attention whatsoever to the persistent – and some would say legitimate – demand of the telecom operators that they should be allowed to bill customers for missed calls. In a country where governments have been known to fall because of the rise in onion prices, this one is a real hot potato for any political party or formation – and not just the UPA – to handle.