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May 8, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA, INDIA — For America in the 1950s, it was the car and the open interstate.

For India today, it is the cellphone.

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since the automobile and the American, perhaps, have a technology and a people wedded as happily as Indians and their mobiles, small and big, vibrating and tringing, Blackberry and plain vanilla. And neither India nor the cellphone will be the same from the pairing.

India now sells more new cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role here than in the wealthy countries where it was invented.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only one-third of the population.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, and a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. The average bill is less than $5 per month, and, if present trends continue, every Indian will have a cellphone in five years.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions. It is partly that with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India also serves variously as a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and organizer. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe but in the chaotic midst of it.

Imagine what it was like, back in the Pre-cellular Age, to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. Phones are centrally located.

The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.

And yet the young Indian rebel, unlike his Western counterpart, does not rebel totally. He wants to savor his new individuality, but do so while sitting with his parents having dinner, listening to his grandmother implore him to get married. He listens, then taps a few keys on his cellphone to escape, then listens some more, and taps, and listens.

The cellphone appeals, too, because it plays into the Indian need to place people. Cellular differences today perform the role that forehead markings and strings around torsos and metal bracelets once did: announcing who outranks whom.

Small people have small phones, and big people have big ones.

Small people have numerical-soup numbers, and big people have numbers that end in 77777 or something like that. Small people have one phone, and big people have two. Small people set their phones merely to ring, and big people make Bollywood songs play when you call them.

The cellphone, in short, has made itself Indian. There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening. And so those who wish to influence Indians are not waiting for the computer to catch on, but are seeking ways to migrate onto the cellphone the things Westerners do online.

Indian companies have invented methods, via simple cellphone text messaging, to wire money to temples, pay for groceries, find jobs and send and receive e-mail (on humble phones with no data connection).

But the most intriguing notion is that cellphones could transform Indian democracy.

Even in this election season, Indians are famously cynical about their senior-citizen-dominated, dynastic, corrupt politics. The educated often sit out elections. But with cellphones’ becoming near-universal, experiments are sprouting with the goal of forging a new bond between citizen and state, through real-time, 24-hour cellular participation.

In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, citizens who file a right-to-information request can now check its status via text message. Anyone who has been to an Indian government office, begging men in safari suits to do their job, will welcome this service.

A number of civic groups, meanwhile, have devised cellphone-based ways of informing voters about candidates for Parliament. If you text your postal code to the Association for Democratic Reforms, it will reply with candidate profiles like this:

DEORA MILIND MURLI (INC) Crim. Cases - No, Assets 175373142, Liab 0, Edu graduate_professional

MOHMAD ALI ABUBAKAR SHAIKH (BSP) Crim. Cases - Yes (1), Assets 445015617, Liab 2489959, Edu illiterate

A new interactivity is dawning in the news media, too. Now, via cellphone, citizens are talking back to the press, creating a continuous feedback loop between reporters and the public opinion they shape. Channels solicit text messages during broadcasts to air opinions and conduct opinion polls. Comments crawl across the screen as talking heads talk.

In 2006, a court acquitted Manu Sharma, a politician’s son, in the murder of a model, Jessica Lall, even though several witnesses had seen him shoot her. This was nothing new in India. But a groundswell of text-message anger made its way onto television screens and compelled officials to retry Mr. Sharma. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life.

Imagine the future: A young woman sits on her sofa. With a few taps, she checks that her tax return has been cleared. With a few more, she learns that her local legislator is a criminal, and she switches to the other candidate. She wires a campaign contribution by text. And then she notices on television a debate on her favorite topic, and listens to the arguments and taps hurriedly into her phone words that will soon scroll across the screen.

It is not Athens, but it would be a start: in the world’s largest democracy, government not by passive consent, but by something like a conversation.