mobile phones

I bought a Nokia windows phone for my wife three years back for valentine's day at rupees 12000($185).  I wanted to change it for this valentines so went to the mobile shops for an exchange offer.  Most of the shops refused to take it back. One shop offered me rupees 400($6) and another rupees 800($12) against purchase of a new phone costing rupees 19500 ($300).

Then i have realised that a fully working phone bought for 12000rs has become next to worthless in 3 years.

Nokia 550

It also struck me how these phones are silently eating into our budgets.  In the last 5 years i changed 4 phones and my wife & teenaged daughter 2 each.  That is 8 phones in all.  Considering each costs about 13k rupees ($200) on the lower side that is more than a lakh rupees ($1600) in five years or about 20k per year.  This sum multiplies 4-5 times if high end phones are used by the family.

Imagine an Iphone which retailed for 35k 3-4 years back is worthless now as no one wants it.

As per open source reports, our country had imports of more than twice our population in the last 6-8 years with majority of the sales going to chinese XIAOMI or HUAWEI or SAMSUNG or other foreign manufacturers.  So we are not only denting our pockets but also filling the coffers of foreign telecom companies.  We have far more phones than there are toilets in the country!!!

And  - what is happening to all the e-waste we are generating?? Where is it getting dumped??  Also a lot of rare earth metals are being used up to manufacture these new smart phones, the excavation of which is reported to be causing significant ecological damage.

This is where the government can consider stepping in and introducing some regulation both to safe guard us from our own spending and the environmental damage this buying spree is doing.  This is one regulation which needs to be implemented in current times than several other archaic ones in force.

But can it be done??  
#mobiles
#china
#xiaomi
#huawei
#india
#imports
#family
#i-phone
 

mobile phone cameras - boon or bane

There are cell phones in the market starting with a VGA camera to upto 18 MP (Mega pixels).  what started out as hazy recordings on a VGA camera have reached a state of cyrstal clear picture with high resolution cameras.

With the increase in resolution, every  individual has become trigger happy and you could find anyone and everyone around you clicking away merrily in the shopping malls, beaches, hotels, roads etc.   Earlier you needed to carry a cumbersome camera (even that reduced in size now) to be able to take pictures and therefore it was carried only by those who really wanted or needed to take picture. Now with camera being a part of the most essential device in our lives (read MOBILE), the camera is also there with us all the time.  And with everyone carrying one in his/her pocket you cannot keep tabs on who is clicking your picture or recording a video of you.  That essentially is the crux of the problem.

Women and men (in some cases) face this perennial problem in the current day world.  There are constantly being clicked, videographed without their consent or knowledge.  If you look around closely next time, you may find some guy quietly clicking away photographs of pretty women on the street.  Sometimes these guys make it obvious to the women that they are clicking a photograph.  I happened to catch one such guy who was blatantly clicking photographs on a beach.  I took his mobile and was shocked to see that he had clicked photographs of many women on the beach in in-appropriate moments when they  had involuntarily exposed themselves (due to the waves) for fleeting moments, as there were on a beach.  Though i made him delete all the photographs he moved ahead and joined up with a gang of four, to whom he narrated his ordeal with me.  They all noticed me and moved to another part of the beach where they continued with the same activity.

similar is the case in a nightclub i visited where youngsters were busy clicking away photographs of women in their clubwear which quite obviously would be revealing.  on complaining about these guys to a bouncer, they were stopped but the moment the bouncer left they continued with their activity again.

few nightclubs and hotels have contemplated installing cell phone jammers but the problem is that it would totally knock out the cell phone signal but the camera which is an inbuilt device in the cell phone would still continue to function

the internet too is full of such photographs - be it women on the beach, in parties or just friendly get togethers.  Many of them photos are of  women having a bit of fun, or in in-inappropriate moments or upskirt shots or of  wardrobe malfunction.  The multiple angles in which such photographs are taken makes one realise no part of any woman is free from the prying lens of a cell phone camera!!

Still, these activities may seem relatively harmless when compared to the increased instances of making explicit videos of rape and molestation forcing the victims on several occassions to commit suicide and on other occassions suffer in silence for fear of their videos being broadcast.  

Honestly, we should ask ourselves - why do we need that camera in the cell phone? if it is to take pics of our near and dear ones, we do have a digital camera!!! if it is to take photographs outside, then what kind of photographs do we intend to take?

Can we ban cell phones with cameras altogether? that may be the step in the right direction as there are very few legitimate uses for the cell phone camera but the ills are too many.   What would the cell phone companies say about that? especially when they have glossy ads highlighting the camera performance in the cell phone!!

The camera in the cell phone is definitely something we can live without. The govt may consider banning the same in the larger social interest!!!

 

The Service of a fly swatter

I used to wake up at 04:00 AM in the morning for practicing karate in the local Dojo. Dojo is a japanese term signifying an assembling place for learning martial arts. We as youngsters spent many an early morning there breaking tiles with a chop of the hand or bricks with a punch of the fist.  Those were the good old days when we trained regularly and strenuously to remain at the peak of our fitness. We sparred actively in mock bouts and my reflexes were considered razor sharp.  After the return from the dojo on a rainy morning while I was enjoying a hot cup of tea with my favourite dosas - up came a lowly fly who tried to have a tasty bite of my eats. Both the sight of that fly and its intentions iritated me no end and therefore armed with a rolled up newspaper doubling as a fly swatter, I used my so called razor sharp reflexes to swat it.  To my shock n surprise, that lowly fly successfully evaded all my attempts and i let it have its fill of dosa in resignation.  On many subsequent occassions too, i hardly used to have a success rate of 10%.  I tried approaching the flies from different angles from the rear, right, left, top and front with little variation in my success rate. Occassionally, it may have marginally improved to 15% but that was about all.   After months of struggle, I gave up accepting that the fly's reflexes are better than mine.  Cut to the present, I am in my middle age, my reflexes are no where near best but I recently swatted a fly at first attempt.  I was thrilled when i could replicate my success ratio over the next few hits also. I was overjoyed and commended myself that i have become an expert fly swatter.  Only when my sucess rate grew alarmingly high, then I realised that its not my reflexes which have become better with age but its the flies that have 'slowed down'. That's a ridiculous presumption, its just You who got better told my ego but neverthless i decided to dig this issue a little further.


That set me off to search the web and various books to gain more info on the topic. To my surprise, I learnt that RF radiation (which is emitted by all cell towers, cell phones and all Wi-Fi devices) is also used as a means to kill insects.  I immediately remembered a scene from the movie 'Terminator Salvation' where a high frequncy device is used to tame a mechanical beast.  RF or Electro magnetic (EM) radiation has two components i.e an electric and a magnetic field. its the strength of the electric field that derives the strength of the radiation and therefore its harmful effects.  Though the strength of the electric field required to kill an insect may be in kilovolts (A cell phone normally emits in millivolts and 1 Kilovolt=1000000 millivolts), prolonged exposure to to even these milli volts of radiation over the years may cause considerable damage.  This is particularly true for people staying closer to the Towers as monitoring all the towers continuosly for the radiation levels emitted, in a country like our's is very difficult.  The lure of easy money offered to apartment high rises and vacant areas for erecting a cell tower is adding to the problem.

as a result there are several questions that need to be answered with the chief among them being:-

1.  How seriously are we studying this issue

2.  With so many learned minds in our country, the harmful effects of radiation might already be known. so how are we planning to control these emissions to have a healthy balance between human health and economic considerations?

3.  Do we need to educate people to stop using unneccessary Wi-Fi devices (for example: wireless hometheatre speakers which envelope them in a maze of Rf energy)

4.  Lastly, an introspective question, if the cell phones and the associated towers are really harming us - Are we ready to dump that cell phone OR be prepared to live with the risks?