The Hindu Business Line : When simple isn’t easy

It all started with my five year-old phone. The Nokia still works. But friends had been finding it a statement of general fade-out from life. The hunt for a new phone began at the new all-brand mobile store. “I am looking for a simple phone toreplace my old one,” I said.

The answer was complicated. Simple now fetched polyphonic ring, FM radio, camera, blue tooth, MP3 and several other features. The young salespersons couldn’t fathom my personality which sought a hardy phone with long battery life, sizable directory, normal ring and no camera.

After much discussion, we called it a truce – they let me go, the way they would an alien. Three rules have authored my notion of the phone – it is first and foremost an instrument to talk. Second, with all those invasions of privacy I support banning cameras on mobile phones and don’t want such a model myself. Third, I care for my music and I like it wholesome, not as a screech, the way most phones with speakers invade public peace. All three have their separate place – you talk on the phone, you click photographs with a camera and you listen to music on a music system. My world was, however, more outdated than an antique; it didn’t exist.

Proof for that came when I decided to buy a camera. I like photography and used to be passable talent with the old SLR camera. It had a simple – yes, simple – grammar, which ran on the logic of sunlight and the chemistry of photographic film. With an exposure meter built in, the SLR was perfect. Now that perfection is endangered. Not because it failed but because the world moved on to being digital.

Digital cameras sell like hot cakes even as the quality of image produced by most don’t compare with what well exposed film delivers. And in attempting to get the digital sensor to be as good as film, the digital in the digital camera reeks of ifs and buts; no more the surety of performance anywhere as with the old mechanical model. With many different specifications possible, digital camera models run into the hundreds. Try defining your want; get a model that fits it and no more, the market aftertaste won’t be different from buying a phone. You end up with a lot more than you wanted in a language you have to learn from scratch. In the market, they would point to the excess you were gifted as proof of fantastic bargain – you get a musical phone that takes pictures; a camera that takes video and a camcorder that takes still photographs. If I want the best still photograph and nothing else, what should I buy – phone, camera or camcorder? If the camera is defined by its ability to click still photographs, why is it present in so many average devices; why not as splicing under a known camera vertical?

One obvious reason is that excess breeds excess. Each multi-functional device takes you to more than one service provider – the photo studio, the radio station, the phone company to name a few. It also teases you with new wants. So in other words, you were not sold a device that satisfied your need; you got one that multiplied your need for the sake of more business. That’s what consumerism is all about and that’s why those marketers love confused consumers and hate the ones with a defined need. It raises the simple – yes, simple – question: if it is so easy to give me excess because they have everything from camera to radio at factory shelves, why don’t they allow me to customise? I could go to the store, give my order and receive my product after a few days. Seems they anticipated the question, that’s why customisation is cost plus in most products.

What they have done is superb! They have parked the realised customer in the costly league and made him pay for exactly that crime – he knows his need. So if you want a phone that only talks or a camera that merely does still photographs, you become a select customer to be serviced away from the cheaper economics of the assembly line. You pay for it.

My camera hunt has become a doctoral thesis. I have discovered everything from manufacturers to expert Web sites and tonnes of product brochures. What I haven’t discovered yet, is my camera. I am sure I will end up with bells and whistles.

Forget the camera, track pants ought to be simple, I decided. I trek and climb a bit, so my preference all along has been pants that taper to the ankle and leave the rock climbing shoes or trekking boots visible to the climber’s eye.

I have failed miserably on two counts – first, my small body size is a vanishing specimen in the market dangerously dominated by bigger people and second, urban fashion has decreed it virtuous not to see one’s feet. “The athletic cut you are looking for is old-fashioned, Sir. The in-thing is loose flared bottoms,” the salesman said. All I needed was a pair of metal rings on my fingers, boxer shorts peeping above the pant and a suitable gait to match the flare; off I go like a rapper. That’s my free market.

(The writer is a Mumbai-based freelancer.)

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