DAYS I WANT TO REWIND

The days I want to rewind and remember once again are those days when I had the so called ‘freedom of speech and expression’. I would never forget them.  During those days I used to greet my friends, acquaintances and my relatives by short message services on daily basis.  I also used to greet them with picture messages especially on the occasion of their birthdays, weddings and other ceremonies.

I had a simple model of mobile phone in my pocket. I used to send messages to my friends and eagerly wait for their reply. I would often recharge my number with message packs, which was easily available in the market. Sometimes the communication network system provided different message offers and schemes. It also availed me from consuming expensive budget.

With the passage of time sending SMS’s to my friends and others became a nightmare for me. Every day there were different models of mobile phones of different brands, which are very costly? Besides purchasing such kind of highly configured mobile phone from which we couldn’t send a single message to our friends due to the SMS restriction.

Now every day I failed to explain the function of ‘message sending’ system, means the process through which we could send text or picture messages to our youngsters. They always asked me, how can we send a text or picture message to our friends and acquaintances through our mobile phones? I used to narrate them the whole process of sending messages by mobile phones and tried to understand them but they never got satisfied with my answers. At last they asked me a single question, why SMS service is banned in Jammu and Kashmir?

Abdul Hussain Muntazree  

published in Kashmir Standard, a weekly Newspaper