SMS Freak!

How many of us would spend 15-20 minutes in composing an SMS? Well, call me a freak, but I do!

This Diwali, much like other festivals, I gave the fancy forwards I’d received a miss and decided to give a personal touch by keying in my wishes, replete with special symbols. It turned out to be a futile (and heartbreaking at that) exercise as none of the 35-40 recipients got any text, just a blank SMS (atleast that’s what the 5 people, who were kind enough to inform me, had to say). And this when I thought, I had learnt my lessons from the past…

When I first got this mobile phone with multilingual capability, I was pretty excited that now I could type SMS in my national language. So when I woke on this cold Lohri morning, I thought it was a good option to stay in the warmth of my quilt and type my Lohri greetings in Hindi. It turned out to be quite a workout for my fingers and revision of Hindi “varnamala” (alphabets).

For instance, to arrive at ‘m’ as in मेरे (“mere”), I had to mentally recite “प फ ब भ म” and try a couple of numbers to know that it was not 6 (keypad prominently displayed MNO for help), but number 8 that I had to press 5 times! At the end of a good half an hour, I was pleased with the results. I had managed to amalgamate Hindi and Punjabi into a couple of lines that seemed to fit into 160 characters.

It didn’t take too long before my pride came crashing down as people replied back saying they received just boxes or absolutely no text as SMS. The monthly bill later revealed that Airtel considered the Hindi alphabets more than 160 characters even though hardly anyone was able to read anything of it! From that moment on, I decided to give Devnagari script a miss for Short Messaging Service.

Special occasions apart, I put in some effort for even my everyday SMS. For one, I don’t like SMS short-hand; which means you is ‘you’ and not ‘u’, see is ’see’ and not ‘c’. And it just doesn’t at “See you at 6.” I find it difficult to end the SMS in a short single line even if it sufficient to convey the message. Brevity be damned, it just doesn’t seem “paisa-vasool” to me!

The underlying thought is – when I’m being charged the full amount for 20 characters as for 160, I might as well go on and add another 100 to ask about the weather or communicate more details. End result – most of my SMS-es are in the range of 150-160 characters.

So a “c u at 6″ would, for me, turn out as 

“Hi, woke up just now. Hope the day’s going well. See you around 6 pm today. Is it possible for you to pick 1 litre of toned milk on the way to my place? “

Of course there are exceptions, but they too revolve around the 160 rule. I might give the ‘you’ a miss if I see my SMS is getting into 162 characters. So I would go back and adopt the ‘u’ even if it means a minute more and a li’l more exercise for my fingers.

Scoorge McDuck would be so proud of me!