4 - Middle class | Smartphones

Summary

Middle class

The day Sheela brought her new phone into work, she clutched her bag extra tight on the Gramin Seva, a shared minivan that she took for her daily commute (Figure 4.1). In the café, Sheela had tucked the phone into her trousers pocket. She took it out carefully and showed me, putting it on the café counter and pressing the home button so the screen would light up. Both of us admired the display – the colours were bright and the images sharply defined. She swiped it open and demonstrated the quality of the camera lens too – with inbuilt ‘beauty’ filters, I could tell and Sheela was convinced, this was going to be a great ‘selfie’ camera. She wiped the screen gently with a paper tissue to rub out the finger marks it had incurred in the course of showing it to me and slipped it right back into her pocket. This was by no means the first smartphone that Sheela had used, but it was the first smartphone that she had bought with her own salary. It was also the only thing she had ever purchased just for herself with her salary.

Following her father's unemployment, Sheela had, along with her mother, taken on the responsibility of a ‘breadwinner’. She handed over all of her salary (at the time INR 7,000 per month) to her mother for household expenses, supplementing the income her mother earned as a domestic worker. If and when there was money left, Sheela got some ‘pocket money’ from her mother. It was this money that she had saved and bought herself a phone with. Although she had seemingly become part of Digital India’s2 growing population of smartphone users, the smartphone had not come easily to Sheela:

I’m so scared of losing it; this is why I don't go on the bus. Last time I went on the bus, one girl's phone was stolen, another one's purse was stolen…. She started crying and I just got scared…. It is scary; we buy phones with such hard work, putting small amounts of money together, can't let it get stolen….