my beautiful ex-mobile phone

12th day of september 2015, one week before my 19th birthday my father finally bought me a new mobile phone. i had been requesting to be bought a new one for quite some time. the biggest reason was the deteriorating battery life of the phone that i had at the time. the phone would go dead in almost no time and it was becoming quite inconvenient for me to keep up. also because my college and home were at a distance of about 25 kilo meters and travelling that length twice a day – i was struggling according to me, you see, and i deserved my requests be taken care of. my father bought me an iphone. it was 5s model and it had a golden and white body at the back. i was the happiest child in the whole world. i hardly understood the configurations and abilities of it – but what really kept me pumped up for many days to come after getting it was its camera. the cameras of apple mobile phones have always been quite advanced if I’m not wrong. plus i knew it because i had taken a few selfies in friends’ apple phones before having one that i could call mine.

25th day of march 2021, i still have it with me. i don’t use it primarily. but if i charge it, i can use it for most tasks which a fairly advanced mobile phone is supposed to do. i sometimes hold it and just hold it and then keep it back in the drawer. anyway, my father bought me a new mobile phone last year. it’s a very good phone, too. it scans my face to unlock. fancy, eh. not when i have a face mask on, of course. and well, it has a wonnnnnderful camera. but i can’t seem to remember the exact date when we purchased this new mobile phone. i mean i have the documents and so, i can check but i don’t have it in my mind right now. thought provoking!

lets not call it difficult but uneasy. it was an uneasy transition for me to move to a new mobile phone. i was… i am too attached to the phone that helped me in a gazillion ways for slightly more than 5 years. i would use it to capture my family being my family, my friends, beautiful places i saw, funny moments. it would take just a few seconds to get the song from a 2007 movie in my ears which my mind would take a few minutes to recall the name of. it also came running with me at the panjab university main ground on all days. id use it to quietly walk past someone i didn’t want to talk on my way back to hostel. haha. it was this phone that made sure there was some way for my parents to wake me up for early lectures through entire semester one. something my parents’ parents did not have the luxury to do if they were to show the courage to send their kids to a faraway place to study the way my parents did.

now, the company that manufactured it kept coming up with newer, fancier software updates, like, all the time. all other phones around me were given these new costumes by all people that ‘owned’ them. whereas my phone, lol poor guy, i hardly let it get any of those. it would get mad sometimes. fair on its part i say. it would also sometimes refuse [to my face] to save the videos i recorded on instagram saying ‘i don’t have any more space, nihal. you better update me, lady.’

i didn’t want my phone to be any more capable to be honest. i just wanted it to keep well for as long. sometimes some apps would shut as they’d go incompatible with the old software. i was never very fond of having squared gateways called applications on my screen for everything. i still use facebook on safari in my quite advanced phone that my brother says will never say ‘goddamnit please make some space in me, I’m choking’ because it has indeed got a lot of space in it. and also because i have lost most part of what we call ‘love for selfies.’ hashtag fuck you selfitis (shh, it’s a disease)….(really, check out selfie syndrome on google, it’s an enlisted mental disorder) wonder if it’s okay to consider it part of evolution when a disease becomes too common? I’m really sorry for even thinking that by the way. Mental health is most important. more important than physical health. i can explain this perhaps later.

coming back to my beautiful ex-mobile device, i don’t know how common or uncommon a trait this is – to find it difficult to let go of objects. its, however, i think needed to some extent. stop updating our things too much, can we? going slow is fun, i give my word for that. fast everything is hard on our well-being, isn’t it. for the planet’s well being, too.

growing love for materials we keep with us is a great thing to practice. sad most self help groups aren’t talking about this. go find the oldest t-shirt you’ve got and give that a good warm hug. it’s been with you for quite some time so it deserves this casual love.

free book recommendation: Barry Schwartz’ 2004 book The Paradox of Choice. enjoy! accepting reviews (not on Barry’s behalf) on my email ID.

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Nihal