Contact-less

Yes, it happens to everyone and it happened to me. My trustworthy phone couldn’t handle the work pressure and went into rehab. It came back but with no memory of earlier life. And since contacts are supposed to be a journalist’s backbone (really? How come I haven’t died yet?), it’s meant to be even more difficult for me. But but but, it’s not all that bad is what I have realized. Like some long lost philosopher who said something about silver linings in dark clouds, I feel this one also comes with its own share of benefits.

Some of the positive points of losing your phone book numbers.
1. Firstly, getting back numbers isn’t that difficult in this day and age of Orkut, Facebook, G chat, etc. So, one common mail or a status message is sufficient to get the numbers back. And if you are a journalist who thinks he has ‘important’ numbers saved on his phone, phhbbtttt to you!!!!!! EVERYONE has them. Just ask the person sitting next to you, period!

2. You come to know the actual number of people who exist in your part of stratosphere. The phone that is otherwise filled with random phone numbers and names that you have never heard of (but just ended up feeding them anyways thinking they will be useful in the future) now only has numbers that matter to you. And you would be surprised that you can actually do a head count. It tells you how big YOUR world is.

3. It serves as an excuse to think of those who you would want to stay in touch with, but perhaps didn’t take the initiative to do so, or maybe just played lazy. You touch base with them once again, and hopefully, you would value the second chance and ensure the person is more than a number in your contact list.

4. When saving the numbers yet again, take time out and observe. The name that goes with the number may not be the same as what it was earlier. For example, a friend whose name was saved as ‘Roshesh’ since college days was now saved as ‘Rashi’, only ‘Rashi’. Earlier I never bothered to save the person’s last name, but not any more, considering I always come across people who have very common names that most probably already exist in the contact list. Save their numbers as well and you can’t make out one from the other. All colleagues’ and ex-colleagues’ numbers were saved as ‘organisation name’ followed by ‘person’s name’, but not any more. Now, it’s only the person’s name. Do these changes say something about me? About how I have changed. Go figure.

5. If someone complains later how you NEVER stay in touch, you can always say, ‘Baba, my phone crashed! What to do? You didn’t call either!’ :P