Meet the smart owners of dumb phones

At 26, Chennai’s Prasad PJ feels like a dinosaur. The world around him has moved on to phones with fingerprint censors and digital assistants but this design engineer is still defiantly holding on to his Nokia 215, a device on which you have to press buttons, sometimes the same button thrice, to send a message. Before this upgrade, for six years, he had been using Nokia 3100, a sturdy entry-level phone which looked like something people would return when lost.“I am a NonDroid user,” says Prasad, a Star Wars fan, revealing his go-to line to stave off comments and pressure from friends and colleagues his age bent upon getting him to upgrade to a smartphone. “I feel a generation gap with my own generation,” says the dimensionally-gifted engineer, who has never taken a selfie in his life.
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Prasad says he has very good reason to resist the sensory onslaught of smartphones which make his friends behave like distant slaves on the dinner table. “The best part is I can sleep at nine and wake up at five,” says Prasad, who catches a bus from Chennai to his workplace in Oragadam at 5.30 am daily. Then, there’s the fact that he doesn’t feel the need to show off a phone as a status symbol. Also, he pays attention to his surroundings. One morning, for instance, he invited a friend for badminton and directed him to the venue by asking him to walk toward the east after getting off the bus. “He checked his phone instead of looking up at the sun,” says Prasad, who has seen friends behave like they have “lost one of their senses” when their phone battery dies. Sure, this means he must book Uber through his desktop, miss out on the luxury of food deliveries, use hard copies of documents and be the last to know about meetups and plans for lack of Whatsapp. “When I ask about plans, friends treat me like HR of companies at interviews. They say ‘we will get back to you’,” says Prasad. But all this, he feels, is a trade-off for keeping his data private and the human part of him intact.
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Prasad may not belong in his 4G generation but he does unintentionally belong in a tiny, scattered club of men across digital India who have managed the feat of resolutely shunning the shiny rabbit hole of smartphones or upgrades at the very least. If you want to reach 78-year-old poet Gieve Patel, for instance, you will either have to dial his landline or text his daughter. A physician who gave up practice 13 years ago, Patel -- who is part of the green movement and has written many poems on the human condition -- says he did not buy a smartphone for two main reasons. First, he fears he would lose it or forget it somewhere. Second, given to going for long evening walks, the poet in him prizes his solitude and inaccessibility. “I like my freedom and don’t think I am missing out on anything,” says Patel.
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While they may seem like oddities in India, it’s important to note that the West —which is in the throes of a backlash against smartphones, gadgets and social media — boasts many celebs and Silicon Valley heretics including engineers and designers trying to detach themselves from the “attention economy”. This stems from growing concern that besides addicting users, technology is limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ given that an international study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity — even when the device is turned off. This sentiment also explains the presence of apps that promise to cut off distraction.

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Closer home too, many in the IT and digital space seem to reflect this aversion. “Airplane mode is my favourite,” says Aishik Saha, a “90s kid” who works in a digital marketing company and who owns an LG K10, a mid-range smartphone that he only bought out of official pressure (“This phone supports Outlook Express”). Every day after finishing work, he turns the mode on during his long commute home from Ghatkopar to Vashi and listens to meditative music. He is on WhatsApp only because he is about to get married and doesn’t want to hurt his prospects but seems to hate the app with a vengeance. “If I don’t reply immediately, I become a busybee or ‘bhai mein attitude hai’,” says Saha. He also hates Autocorrect because he has suffered the ignominy of chaste Bengali words turning into suggestive messages. As his colleagues move on to flagship phones with 9GB RAM, he prays that his phone does not suffer any updates (“I am a nostalgic”).
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For 57-year-old Krishnakumar Mathurakode Puthenveedu aka KK, an avid traveller from Bengaluru, aversion to technology is a natural consequence of a lifetime spent as an “IT slave”. “I feel the more you get into technology, the more your life goes haywire. And now there’s Alexa? Come on man,” says Puthenveedu, who recently bought a “Moto G or E, one of the cheap phones” only so he can use Uber and Ola apps. He hasn’t succumbed to Whatsapp and uses Facebook only on his desktop. KK has never taken a selfie and finds them painfully narcissistic (“people are taking selfies in toilets”). When not travelling, KK has found a way to spend time without the crutch of a smartphone. It’s called “sitting on my a** all day and dissing the government”.
With inputs from Radhika Mukherji
This is the fifth part of a series