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India's love affair with hi-tech
flirting
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - The short messaging service (SMS) used by mobile
telephones is creating a revolution in India, and among
other things, it has revived the country's famed Kama
Sutra spirit of sexual freedom, long-suppressed by the
intrusion of prudish values into the country.
Indeed, within a few years of its introduction
as a value-added service for mobile phone users, SMS has
in many circles come to stand for "some more sex".
Indian scholars are now studying strange new subjects
such as "textual intercourse", "hi-tech flirting",
"electronic aphrodisiac", "Viagra with buttons and a
ring tone" and so on.
An estimated 25 million
short messages are exchanged daily by just 400,000 SMS
users out of India's 8 million cell phone owners. This
works out to an average of over 60 messages per phone
per day.
On special days such as national
festivals, SMS traffic increases so much that the
networks are clogged, forcing users to stare helplessly
at their mobile phone screens that say: "Message sending
failed."
This is exactly what happened on
Monday, the day that India celebrated Diwali, the
beautiful festival of light, that commemorates the
victory of good over evil. SMS traffic was reported to
be four times more than normal as mobile users across
the country opted to send Diwali greetings through this
most economical, convenient and instant mode of
communication. The increase in traffic spelt huge
revenue for cellular operators as they charge Rs 1.50
(US three cents) per message, but it also resulted in
network clogging.
In Delhi alone, 9 million
messages were sent. Hutchison and Airtel recorded over
4.6 million and 3.4 million messages respectively on
Diwali day in the capital, as opposed to 1.1 million to
1.2 million messages on a normal day. In Mumbai, BPL
recorded 2 million outgoing messages.
Hutchison
says that it recorded SMS traffic of close to 5 million
during the period. "That represents a 500 percent jump
over normal usage. Compared to last Diwali, New Year or
Holi, the rush was unprecedented," said Hutchison
officials.
The problem of clogged networks was
accentuated by the tardiness of users in deleting "read"
messages and in cleaning up their mail boxes. That led
to a pile up of messages at the network end.
What also contributed to the problem was that it
was not just plain old "Happy Diwali" text that the
networks had to carry. With flashing messages and
picture messages with different ring tones fighting for
airspace, the load on the networks got worse. So users,
for next time, were advised to do what they have to do
to beat the morning rush hour - the earlier you start,
the better your chances of getting through.
On
normal days, however, there is no such problem. For tens
of thousands of upwardly mobile people it has become a
new life style. The addiction is growing.
In a
cover story entitled "Love, Sex and SMS" in India's
largest circulated news magazine, India Today, Shefalee
Vasudev writes, "In most cases, hi-tech flirting - often
punctuated with smileys and winking 'emoticons' - is a
private display of affection. You can hear them in pubs,
meetings, seminars, fashion shows, sit-down dinners,
drawing rooms, even in bedrooms. The buzz of the SMS has
become an omnipresent, everyday rhythm, sometimes the
secretive smiles giving away the frenzied exchanges
between couples even as they sit in the same room
watching a fashion show or attending a corporate
conference. Some users confess that they spend a good
part of the night making SMS love.
"The amazing
thing is the way SMS has charmed the number and variety
of people. From celebrities and corporate barons to
politicians and professionals, SMS has made mushy idiots
out of many. It is indicative of a paradigm shift in
personal communication among Indians, for many of whom
explicit talk about love and sex is restrained by
conscious cultural reminders, but continues to simmer
inside."
The magazine quotes some celebrities:
""It can be great fun and surely enhances
intimacy.When I get an official message [through SMS], I
do feel a little disappointed." - Chandan Mitra,
editor-in-chief, The Pioneer daily newspaper.
"Letters are outdated and phone calls can be
boring. SMS is direct and exciting." - Neena Gupta,
actress.
"Infidelity was always there. SMS has
just made it easier. It is natural for many to write
what they're hesitant to say. Now technology enables us
to do just that in relationships where you can't speak
much." - Rupa Ganguly, actress.
"SMS is like
Viagra with buttons and a ring tone. I believe it is a
very 'powerfully silent' communication tool, very
personalized and almost akin to human touch. I use it
for three things primarily: work, play and foreplay. On
the foreplay front, it is great for mind games," - Suhel
Seth, advertising professional.
"Personal
communication through SMS is much better than a voice
mail and sure, one cannot rule out its fun component." -
Rajiv Pratap Rudy, minister of state for commerce.
"SMS takes away the awkward blushes of picking
up the phone and not knowing what to say," - SMS freak
and actor, Parveen Dabas, of Monsoon Wedding
fame.
"The ultimate four-letter word is 'talk'.
Talk is a potent foreplay and unfortunately it doesn't
happen much in Indian bedrooms. There is no doubt that
if a man and woman exchange 50 SMS messages in an hour's
time, it has more to do with sexual intent than just
flirtation." - Dr Prakash Kothari, India's best-known
sexologist.
"Culturally, Indians find verbal
expression difficult. SMS is perfect. It is direct but
avoids face to face contact. However, people wrongly
perceive intensity in passion as depth in a
relationship." - Rita Marathey, communications expert.
SMS addiction is no doubt a world-wide
phenomenon. A recent survey by UK-based TV station The
Dating Channel found that some people would rather give
up chocolate and TV than lose the SMS facility. But in
India it has opened the floodgates of love and lust. It
has provided a perfect medium of expression, and an
intensely private one at that, for the bashful,
repressed, inhibited Indian, particularly the woman.
"It really is a woman's medium," says Vir
Sanghvi, editor-in-chief of The Hindustan Times, who
feels that SMS has empowered a lot of women to be
original when sending text about love and romance,
something about which they would otherwise be shy.
Writer Anil Dharker agrees. "Dirty jokes used to
be such a male thing," he says. "But dirty SMS jokes as
a form of women's empowerment will make a minor footnote
in the history of the women's liberation movement."
Statistics support these observations. A study
done by the International Data Corporation in India
found that women use SMS more frequently than men. One
factor perhaps is the room for innovation in using
abbreviations, the so-called 'texting'. SMS junkies
consider this fun. It provides an outlet for their
creativity. So much so that some girls say that they
would leave their current partners if they found another
person who was better at SMS, that is, if he could
devise better, more imaginative texts.
"Texting
provided a lifeline," says Vasudev. "With 75 percent of
people using the technology to flirt and 25 percent
claiming it made them feel more confident and witty. SMS
works as a tool for verbal foreplay because it can be
graphic and imaginative. Moreover, there are no rules to
this infectious evolving language of phonetic
abbreviations."
In an article titled "r u
hookd?", K Sunil Thomas illustrates this point: "Its
shrt'n'swt, its gr8 fun, & evn bd splng wrks! If you
are able to read through that sentence without blinking,
then you are one of the millions across India who are
avid fans of SMS, that natty feature on your mobile
phone which lets you keep in touch with anyone around
the world for almost nothing."
Love and lust
have always had powerful advocates and equally powerful
enemies. In the case of SMS love, the greatest enemy can
be your spouse, if any. SMS has made it possible for
married couples to send love messages to third partners
while in the company of their spouses. This is
generating a lot of mistrust and snooping around.
Mobile service providers say that husbands are
increasingly demanding printouts of their wives' SMS
records. But this is not as easy as in the case of
normal mobile calls. As the networks can spare only
limited lines for SMS and the traffic is heavy, it is
possible to get records of messages sent only a couple
of hours earlier. Thus, the frenzy of "textual
intercourse" can go on for some more time until
technology devises newer methods of snooping and making
SMS as risky as mobile phone communication itself.
Jealous spouses are not the only ones to ask for
monitoring, however. They have powerful collaborators in
the intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, the signature
tune of contemporary life is not love, even lust: it is
terrorism. Terrorism, or freedom struggle, as some put
it, plants its shadow everywhere. A powerful and very
private communication tool like SMS cannot be immune
from it. Terrorists can use it. So the governments have
to intervene.
"There is no technology to trace
an SMS," says a telecom official. Acknowledging this,
the police hope that technology moves fast enough so
that messages can be intercepted in the same easy manner
in which voice calls can be overheard. In the past few
months, the police feared that Kashmiri militants were
using SMS channels, even though mobile phones do not
work in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The
government of India has asked cell phone operators to
put in place SMS interception technology to facilitate
monitoring. But this can be done only on the directive
of the home secretary (or an officer designated by him)
or a state's chief secretary. Once an alert is issued,
the operator can keep records of all messages sent and
received on a number. Ordinarily, operators do not keep
the contents of an SMS once it is sent. Only the number
to which the message is sent is recorded.
When
the government intervenes and the police want to monitor
a technology, courts cannot be far away. Says telecom
lawyer Ramji Srinivasan, "If a court asks for the
reproduction of a text message, the mobile service
providers will have to submit it."
Lawyers have
raised the next logical question: Is SMS a legal
document? The Information Technology Act, 2000, makes
any record sent in electronic form admissible evidence
in a court of law. Electronic record is defined as
"data, record or data generated, image or sound stored,
received or sent in an electronic form or microfilm or
computer-generated micro fiche". Electronic form is
defined as "any information generated, sent, received or
stored in media, magnetic, optical, computer memory,
microfilm, computer generated micro fiche or similar
device". An SMS sent from a mobile is accepted as
"electronic record" transmitted in "electronic form".
Whether it is authentic or not will be subject to the
usual tests under the general rules of evidence.
One problem for the courts, however, will remain
- unraveling the SMS language and translating it to a
normal language. The accuracy or otherwise of
translations, too, will provide the lawyers with the
opportunity to drag out cases for years.
Sample
some of the SMS messages collected by India Today, and
if you can write as well in this language, you may have
good prospects in India's SMS love industry:
"My
mst ergnus zones are a cktail of d snsory & d
tactile: d brsh of lips over lng, wet folds, deep prbing
xtasies & silences."
"If i tell u tht u hv a
beutful bdy, wl u hld it agnst me? Thr r so mny rsons to
yearn for u. Luv is jst 1 of thm."
"Lst nite
dnces b4 my eys. Whn cn we tango agn? I wnt 2 awkn
desirs tht u dnt knw exst."
Poets are not the
only people to despair of their trade, with every Tom,
Dick and Harry trying his hand at poetry in the new SMS
language. There are others. The traditional greeting
cards industry, for instance.
Every Valentine's
Day, the $62 million greetings card industry enjoys a
boom as cards with Cupid, hearts and messages of love
make brisk sales. This year, however, industry observers
felt that the seductive power of paper cards may not
work because of the SMS rage. This has made the cards
industry, already reeling from the growing use of
e-cards, wake up to the threat posed by SMS.
According to industry officials, Christmas, New
Year's Day and Valentine's Day card sales account for
over 30 percent of the industry's annual sales. "One
year ago, it was e-cards that created a major impact on
the greeting cards industry. Now, youth are increasingly
turning toward SMS," said Vijayant Chhabra, director
(marketing) of Archies Greetings and Gifts Ltd. "While
it is too early to judge the likely impact of SMS on
this year's Valentine's Day, we hope that customers use
SMS as a supplement to cards and not as a mode of
communication in itself," he told Indo-Asian News
Service.
Archies, which has a 40 percent market
share in the cards industry, has seen its net profit
tumble in the last few quarters. The company reported a
net profit of Rs 35 million in the quarter ended
December 2001, down from Rs 45 million a year ago. The
greetings card industry has also been affected by the
severe economic downturn, with some companies saying
business is down by 50 percent. Analysts say that SMS,
on the other hand, is experiencing rapid growth because
of the low cost of messaging, its ease of use in noisy
environments, unobtrusive communication during meetings
and roaming agreements across nations.
"The main
reason why mobile phone users are adapting to the
messaging culture is cost. A simple paper greeting card
is 10 times the price of an SMS message," said an
industry analyst with a management consultancy firm.
"The cost and speed of the service are turning people
away from the plain old greeting cards. We have seen
that recently during Diwali and New Year's Day."
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
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