news details |
|
|
| BSNL is hurting public psyche | | | If leading actress Priety Zinta were to make phone calls from Jammu would have certainly refused to endorse the BSNL brand whatever sum the company may have promised. The citizenry of Jammu has been simply let down by the BSNL authorities. Unfortunately the authorities fail to understand that this service since long has been an emotional insignia and identity of its possessors not merely a service. The identity issue is not simply one that relates to phone ownership. The issue is somewhat deeper. The easiest proof of address anyone can procure, and not have government offices act testy, is a BSNL landline bill. Voter ID card and the PAN card do the trick nicely, but in their absence (or loss), it is the landline that stands up to be counted. There is a celebrity-endorsed BSNL ad we must all be familiar with, since it has run for quite a while now. In it, Priety Zinta, the film star, is a prospective bride being checked out by her in-laws to be. She plays the role of the demure bride rather well until the question of a landline crops up. The groom's side admits to not having installed a landline. At this point Priety transforms into an aggressive contemporary young woman, clearly unwilling to marry into a home that has no BSNL landline. After all, she says, it is the identity of a home. What the ad insinuates is that a home has no standing, as it were, without a landline. The ad reels back to another era, and the associations with that era are not exactly flattering for the government owned telephony company; it must be admitted that BSNL is a relatively new identity, corporatised and quite apart from the older department of telephones under the Ministry of Communications. Back in those days (as late as the early 1990s) you had to wait interminably for a telephone booking to mature. There was, in fact, an even earlier time when a telephone took more than 10 years to ring from the time it was booked! To have one installed was more than just a matter of privilege: it was a luxury, a matter of status. Government officers had red-coloured official phones installed in their homes, as opposed to the dull black objects ordinary mortals had to make do with. It was not uncommon for officers to snip off their red phones and pack them with other valuables upon superannuation. The landline was more than mere proof of residence; it was proof of arrival for the middle class, until of course the Maruti 800 happened in 1984.
The BSNL ad is anything but savvy; it almost seems to bully you into having to own a landline, if only for reasons others than those related to telephony, though features like broadband and so on are mentioned in passing. To the chagrin of one and all, the BSNL consumers in Jammu have been let down by the authorities so much that they are feeling emotionally bruised. The Corporation with its quantitative expansion has failed to make quality as criteria of growth. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
