Independence Day 1996 Mp4moviez

[Etta Lesniak]

Theseproblems were so common, that misbehaving phones found their way into Indian movies. The most famous example from my childhood is from the 1987 movie Mr. India, where Annu Kapoor playing Mr. Gaitonde, editor of the Crimes of India, has a phone so dysfunctional it became a character in the film. And writers Salim-Javed, masters of setting up characters, introduce Gaitonde and his phone through a series of wrong numbers.

In a post a few weeks ago, I wrote that two thirds of all Indians have access to a smartphone, and 95% Indians will have access to a smart phone by 2040. But this transformation is not limited to smart phone penetration, cost, quality, and access. It extends to major plot points and tropes in Hindi cinema because of the state of telephones under socialism. And how these tropes different from Hollywood movies and changed after telecom liberalization. The rest of the post tells the story through 18 movie clips.

Indian telecommunications infrastructure was so bad by the 1980s that crossed connections became a trope in Indian films that continued until the turn of the century. In Mr. India, an important plot point is when Sridevi overhears a conversation between Daga (Sharat Saxena) and Mr. Wolcott (Bob Christo) about Hawa Hawaii.

For the current generation of smartphone users, wrong numbers arise when the person dialing makes an error while dialing the number. In the good old days, this kind of wrong number also happened because of a misprint in the phone directory.

In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1995), two characters named Anjali get mixed up by an operator at the hotel - and the friends who will turn lovers manage to have a brief, though frustrating, conversation after decades without realizing it.

Another problem was poor sound quality and disturbances and dead lines. This led to yet another trope - faking disturbances and poor-quality connections. In this hilarious sequence, Satish Kaushik and Johnny Lever avoid creditors (Rakesh Bedi and Satish Kaushik respectively) by faking poor quality phone connections - the only respite in the otherwise awful, painfully long and boring Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehete Hain (1999).

And I cannot think of comedies from my childhood without Jaane Bhi do Yaaron (1983) at the top of the list. Here is a mishmash of all the phone problems, waiting for long distance calls to connect, poor sound quality, phone line mix-ups used masterfully as a distraction technique in this ridiculously zany scene with Naseeruddin Shah and Satish Kaushik.

The reason for the poor call completion rate in both early twentieth century America and late twentieth century India was the lag in adopting the latest technology. Initially, errors were largely manual, because telephone companies used humans to operate telephone switchboards (you can see the women working the manual switchboard in the Sorry, Wrong Number clip above).

In the very early years, teenage boys were employed as switchboard operators, but their mischief, inattention to detail, and overall inefficiency got them replaced wholesale by young women. In 1950, about one of 13 working women in the US was employed as a telephone operator. Though women made fewer errors than teenage boys, they were overworked and overwhelmed by calls as the number of subscribers increased, and human error was common. The only solution was to reduce human error move from a manual to an automatic system.

The difference with automatic telephone switching was that the cost structure, perhaps surprisingly, favored the smaller firms with their smaller customer bases. With the electromechanical systems of the day, each additional customer was more, not less, expensive. Economies of scale weren't in the picture. To oversimplify somewhat, a network with eight customers needed eight times eight, or 64, interconnections; a network with nine needed 81.

Another consequence of a state monopoly over telecom was that the number of phone lines in India were very few, especially given the population. Some of this had to do with per capita incomes. But another reason was the price and quantity controls in all aspects required to produce phone instruments, wires, etc. In 1990, India had less than six million telephone connections which served a population of 892 million, with 2.5 million requests on the waiting list, where the waiting time was almost half a decade. Anyone who had a phone provided either a free service or charged for the use of the phone by those around them. Local mom and pop stores with a phone took messages for customers.

Even in 1960, when Pillow Talk was a result of individuals waiting for personal phone lines, Americans had more access to phones than any other country. The US had 49.3 million fixed telephone subscriptions. Jerry Lewis in Bellboy, struggling to figure out which phone ringing, had Americans in stitches.

When Mr. India was conceptualized and shot in 1985-86, Indian telecom began its long due reforms, though slowly. The first major institutional reform split the DoPT and created a separate department of telecommunications. Large metropolitan areas like Delhi and Bombay were served by the newly structured (still state-owned) Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL); services in the rest of the country remained with the DoT; and international telephone service was under Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL).

Eventually, the government introduced a unified license regime, mobile broadband, and mobile number portability. The cumulative effect of the reforms dismantled the monopoly of the state and encouraged competition in the telecommunications sector. This was also accompanied by rising incomes because of trade and openness and liberalization of industrial policy. The move away from socialism meant private individuals and businesses were allowed to transact more freely, and phones were essential to enable this higher level of social cooperation. Higher income and business revenues meant a swift rise in demand for phone lines, and the market responded.

If one were to look for the single most ubiquitous marker of post-liberalization India, it would be mobile phones. Indians leapfrogged from 1940s technology directly to mobile and smart phones post liberalization in the nineties. Mobile phone subscriptions took off after the New Telecom Policy of 1999.

Unlike early years of Strowger switches, cellular technology thrives on economies of scale and post-liberalization India provides that scale. But the technological and cultural consequence was that within a decade, India went from horrible call quality, wrong numbers, crossed connections, and yelling to be heard on long distance calls to virtually error free connections over mobile phones!

By 2008, in A Wednesday, a thriller revolving around terrorism in Mumbai, cellphones were used to detonate bombs, communicate anonymously, and negotiate with the police. Burner phones are used throughout the film but the climax (1:18:15) hangs on the precision of a mobile phone call.

In Rajneeti (2010), one of the murders in the killing spree by rival political parties is a car bomb detonated by a phone call. These sequences were not that different from phone activated bombs in Hollywood films like Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Hindi cinema used the same tropes as Hollywood, except now it was in the same decade.

Post liberalization the phone tropes had morphed, based on phones as a precision device! This trope is more familiar to Gen Z and Gen Alpha Indians and those outside India watching Hollywood movies and TV series.

This post is not an exhaustive list of these tropes in Hindi Cinema, and as a movie buff I hope others add to the list. I would also love to learn more about how these tropes were used in Indian cinema in other languages.

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Thanks for sharing the history of telecom in India. I lived through much of what you describe here. It is such a trip down the memory lane. It is the scholars like you that gives me hope for a more advanced India. Thank you for what you do. I thoroughly enjoyed your work on 1991 project and your podcast. And ones with AV as well.

As a young HVAC engineer, I did lot of work for DoT in early 90s when E10B exchanges were installed. The Godrej cupboard like racks were technical marvel. They could provide 10,000 lines at go with additional expansion in multiple of 1000s when the capacity needed enhancement. And all that in 25ft x 25ft rooms with normal 10ft height. Those E10Bs really changed India's fixed telephone line scene and then the free incoming + Reliance Rs. 500 cellphone changed the cellular landscape. Sandwiched between these two was a short Pager era which met its quick death & no-one even mourned.

In 1984, the year I was born, 0.4 of 100 Indians had a fixed phone line. Today, there are 85 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 Indians. But even this statistic doesn\u2019t quite capture the transformation I have witnessed in my lifetime.

In the eighties, when we called relatives long distance, we had to book a \u201Ctrunk call\u201D and a manual phone operator - a government employee - would connect us. It took forever to connect, the call dropped often, the line quality was poor, and we yelled just to be heard. Until last year, my then 103-year-old, now late grandfather spoke louder when I called him from the US. I have had more than one hilarious chat with a wrong number, and overheard at least one crossed connection in my teenage years.

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