Dheeraj Kalgutkar

Imagine you receive a call from your friend, you pick the call and some minutes through the conversation, your friends voice ghosts away and out-of-nowhere you hear this, The number you have dialled is incorrect. Please check the number and dial again. What the heck, right? You did not even dial this call. You received the call which means by default that the number is valid. That’s exactly what has been happening to me on calls for a few days now. Strange and weird. Before this… For months now, many of my family members and friends have told me how when they call me, they get robot voices that tell them that I’m out of coverage area or my phone is switched off when I’m in a place with good network and using my phone perfectly. There are network bars and I’m browsing the net. Moreover, I have faced this issue being in Pune, Mumbai and even in Karnataka’s countryside. Once I even checked it myself by dialling my number from a friend’s cellphone. This i...

There’s some charm about texting. I feel one really is more freer than he or she is face-to-face. The flirt in you really comes alive and shines there. But in contrast to a conversation over coffee or brunch, texting has its own downsides. I’m not actually talking about a slow text-er or someone who only replies to your long texts with ‘hmm’, ‘ok’, ‘yup’ etc. They no doubt are absolute putdowns. But they only disappoint you. They don’t scare you. But there are occasional, very rare moments in chats which mess with your mind, those that scare the shit out of you. The moment when you ask yourself, wait, what did I just do? Most of the times when chats go long and deep, you get your mojo going, and juices just flow. You say stuff without worrying about their consequences. You feel confident that this won’t be misunderstood or that sarcastic remark which is so obvious, they’ll get. But no, that’s not how it unfolds. Suddenly, all of a sudden, person from the other...