:: Farrukh Dhondy

Vibrating mounds of mobile waste

Farrukh Dhondy

"I loved a girl, she didn’t love me.

A thief, I assailed her sanctity,

— ‘Twas long ago and now I know

Love is the lock and not the key".

From Banjara Ballads by Bachchoo

July.25 : My Toronto second cousin twice or thrice removed, Rustom Immoralearningswalla, once told me a joke involving Gujarati-English puns. It was all about different makes of mobile phones which Gujarati wives boasted that their husbands walked about with. I can’t for the life of me remember the punch line and wouldn’t repeat in a family newspaper even if I could, but it involved distortions of the brand names "Nokia", "Siemens" and "Motorola". I was reminded of this joke when I read the announcement of a conference between the world’s mobile manufacturers to agree on a common attachment for and a common voltage conversion for all phone-chargers.

This article said this was desperately necessary as several million tons of discarded and redundant phone chargers (yes, you read that correctly, several million) had to be disposed of each year. They couldn’t be recycled.

I can believe it. Even in a household with two daughters, there are at today’s count 18 phone chargers belonging to past models clogging up the drawers of the study and shoved into the spaces where untwinned socks go. Every time one changes a handset model, which competitive phone companies constantly tempt you to do with offers of newer features every week, a new charger is pressed into service as the socket on the handset is different from that of the one before. Even Nokia, of which I have six spare and past handset models, have changed the size of their charger plug at least twice as the plug-socket junctions get progressively smaller.

Obviously, if the companies make a uniform model charger, there won’t be that volume of unrecyclable waste and several factories in China will have to diversify or close down. It will save space in the home too.

This method of saving the planet has never been one of my hobby-horses. Though I have always seen myself as someone who is quite normal in wanting to keep up with technology and to use to the full the inventions that make life more communicative, I find as I grow older that I have begun to resist change for the sake of change. If my old phone works just as well as a new one and I can call and be called and text abuse to my enemies from the one I have, I don’t need the new do-everything model that mows the lawn, cooks the curries, does the beds and provides you with a virtual girlfriend.

The truth is that millions do. I increasingly find that the conversation between the intellectually-challenged young (dimwits with more money than sense) revolves around the features that their handsets can offer them. I am sure some of these "features" are valuable. I wouldn’t scoff at making calls and taking them, at sending and receiving texts and emails. I have even used the calendar and clock on my mobile and now and then the calculator and converter of weights and currencies when I figure out how to do it. Of course, a phone should be able to store numbers and yes, even to take the occasional photograph. But a video and tape recorder? These and some more advanced features of handsets seem to me to be passing indulgences to occupy children and entertain idiots.

Now one learns that apart from the massive tonnage of phone chargers thrown away each day, the waste collection services of the UK have allocated special disposal procedures and places for phone sets, iPods, laptops and all the wretched gadgets that we are becoming slaves to.

There was a time when my father could sell his old Grundig tape-recorder with its twin spools to the next owner and use the spare change to buy himself a record player on which we could stack 45rpm discs. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall — a 78rpm record player is as extant today or as extinct today as a Dodo.

There will be no end to the inventions that make the last piece of gadgetry redundant. The world, or a significant part of it — one is aware that some people still live hand to mouth and don’t even have the basics — has come to the point where the ghost has vanquished the machine. The idea, the brainwave that inhabits the machinery has become more valuable than the physical tool. The intellectual property is what we are after and of course the slick designs go with it. But the slickly designed artefact becomes valueless when the next step of invention expands the "functions". Last year’s model reduced not to the status of an older car, say, which millions will continue to use but to worthlessness. Last year’s model has become garbage to be disposed of.

Though I can visualise the earth in Highgate cemetery trembling and opening up as Karl Marx turns in his grave as I write this, in a strange way, this supremacy of the intellectual product over the manufactured one is one aspect of what he predicted. Contrary to what pseudo-Gandhians, Stalinists, Maoists, poverty-worshippers and people who can’t or don’t read believe, Marx never thought or wrote that predominantly or uniformly peasant societies such as Russia, China or even Kerala and Bengal could revolutionise themselves into communist states. That could and would only happen when the material needs of the entire population could be adequately met by the productive machine of the society without a fight. Human beings, freed from the slavery of the production process would certainly work, but their work would be cultural and civilising, not degrading as in the dark satanic mills of Marx’s time.

He couldn’t have foreseen it but the inventions of the infotech age are now beyond doubt, proving that the pace of invention, the intellectual conquests of invention and their application and use by large numbers of the population are becoming the prizes of consumption.

Yes, one fashion of dress replaces another and the old dress is given away to the charity shop, but in the world of electronics, these solid-looking alluring products can’t even be given away.

In any dump in Britain one can see the thousands of television sets, old computers, amplifiers and speaker sets and now mobile phones piled up to be thrown into land-fill sites. The television sets still work, as do the computers, amplifiers, phones etc. They have been left behind by the march of invention. They are as wanted as stale fish.