The effect of Mobile's Mobilizing the world

How important is a cell-phone to our everyday existence? Ever wondered about it? Well, rather important if you may think a bit about it. A case in point would be the example of last week where i forgot to carry my cell-phone with me to office. By the time i reached home late in the evening, there were about 10 missed calls and 15-16 messages to be responded to. (I may be exaggerating a little, but :P). So this brings us to the pertinent topic at hand. Mobile evolution has revolutionized communications so much that even the most unexpected of people have cell-phones. Imagine my surprise when the other day the vegetable stall owner offered her cell phone number to my mom so that my mom could place orders through that. (Truly astonishing). So, availability of mobile phones with everyone now brings us to the matter of Mobile phone users which I have particularly observed over the past few days. They can be classified into the following categories:

The Sabzi Wali(wala): - The type I have already talked about. :P They are those people whose new found sense of connectivity keeps them on cloud no. 9. Although, they rarely make any calls from their phones themselves :).

The Student: - They are typically youngsters barely in their teens, continuously typing out SMS's. (Speaking doesn't give that pleasure mate :P. And yeah, Messaging is very cheap ;))

The High-Flying Executive: - Investment Bankers, (some) IT professionals, Suave Businessmen fall in this category (I apologize if i have missed out someone). They generally own very expensive PDAs which are used for business purposes too. They carry a very important looking attitude and continuous keep fiddling with their Styluses.

The middle-Class: - They, as their name signifies, have the Middle end cell phones, which they are fiercely protective about. Hell, i even saw a person actually keeping his phone packed inside a plastic cover. He had to remove the cover every time he attended a call :O.

And if u don't fall in any of these categories, then you do fall in my category. :P

One special thing i would like to mention is that, contrary to expectations, its not the Lower-Class or the Students who are poor at cell phone etiquettes. It is mostly the educated Indian class which is so poorly literate about Cell-phone manners that it sometimes makes me cringe. Some of the examples would include keeping the phone in loud ringer mode during important meetings, in cinema halls; speaking loudly in Public spaces causing inconvenience to others. I feel we need to learn manners before we are allowed to carry cell-phones. And a fine be imposed on people behaving irresponsibly with respect to cell-phone etiquettes.

Hope i made some sense :P.