Lot Messaging Service

When I arrived Bangalore for my BE in 2002, I was amazed to see that every student had a cell phone in his/her possession. Telecommunication was booming in India. And Bangalore was the centre of Telecom Industry . The cellular services were competing with each other armed with attractive 'student' offers to lure the growing market segment, namely college students. These offers invariably included unlimited free SMS's.

Soon, I got my Nokia 1100 and overuse, misuse, abuse of this revolutionaly technology called Short Message Service followed.


1. Where are you ?
It was most common SMS text ever circulated in Ramaiah's campus. (and am sure in every other college in Bangalore).
Lost in a crowed? SMS where are you to 'send all friends in group' to get real time location of your pals.
Boredf? Send a wer r u to your mobile chat friend to start a sms conversation.
Waiting for unpunctual friend too long : sms w u .

The utility of this text became so apparent that soon this phrase was replaced by a single letter w.

I was once riding my bike (ok, borrowed bike) already late for a birthday party. My cellphone in my pocket began to ring. I took out the cell phone at red signal only to find that there were no missed calls, but 20 sms from friends with same text: W

2. Okay !
Okay (and in due course just K) was the most popular SMS reply to every possible SMS. Here's an example of its overuse
Dinesh: W
Dushyant: Room
Dinesh: K
Dushyant: K
Dinesh: Don't Ok fr K
Dushyant: K
Dinesh: u r as ol
Dushyant: K

3. cm40

This SMS has its root in Student's home. It was first coined by Tushar Pandit. The original SMS text used to read 'Come for Tea' which circulated in hostel during the tea-time in Hostel-Canteen in evening. After Tushar's brilliant coding, cm40 became the trend.

Some more SMS's which were quite popular among hostelites

4. sagar ? : want to go to Sagar Bakery for snacks
gt ? : want to have Ginger Tea (at Sagar ofcourse !! )
down ? : Wanno go Down for snacks
( Down was a down hill road which led to another bakery)

5. Q3-a ? (typical sms during tests)

6. Call me , no currency

7. movie 2nite , arrange bike

8. Proxy plz

9. Dude, am standing next to you

10. last sms ws nt fr u

Simple Truth

Siddhartha got me the book from India. I wanted to read it for quite some time. So when Sid decided to go to India over weekend, I had pleaded him to get me 

" My Experiments with Truth " by Mahatma Gandhi.

Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi wrote this book in his mother-tounge,Gujrati entitled 

Satyana Prayogo athva Atmakatha?

The first thing that struck me about the book (after reading couple of pages) was the blatant simplicity. I was expecting a highly sophisticated, phylosophically charged rhetoric with citations from Aristotle and Kant. 

I was blissfully dissapointed. Perhaps, I had forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi had always stood for Simplicity.