Geetanjali Krishna: Education in the smartphone age

The other day, my 64-year-old cook proudly brought a new acquisition for me to see. It was a mobile phone gifted to her by her grandson. “He told me that this way, he could speak to me whenever he wanted,” she said happily. “It’s wonderful because he lives at the other end of town and I see far too little of him." I was happy too, but for selfish reasons. The phone meant that I could finally contact her whenever I needed to. Or so I thought.

Days later when I tried to call her, she did not pick up the phone. She didn’t call me back either. I wondered if all was well. Later when she came to work, it turned out she had seen that she had a missed call, but being illiterate, had been unable to see who it was. “I didn’t want to waste my balance by calling back, when I didn’t know who had called in the first place,” she said.

Over the next few months, I realised that the cook’s illiteracy made the mobile phone work like a good old landline. Her physiotherapy centre texted her about the change in schedule, but obviously she couldn’t read it. Her service provider sent her a text that the balance on her phone was running low, but she was oblivious to it. Then she wondered why she couldn’t make calls anymore. “Being illiterate in today’s world,” she said in frustration one day, “is like being blind, deaf and dumb all at once!”

The more I thought of it, the more I realised how hard a literate world might seem to a completely unlettered individual. How did she shop for her daily needs, I asked. “I recognise currency notes,” she said. “I never set up monthly running accounts with any shopkeeper as my neighbours do, because I cannot add.” She proceeded to count from one to 10 for me with childish pride. Ever since her husband had died eight years ago, the biggest problems she faced were while travelling. “Since I cannot read the names of bus stops, I only go to familiar places by bus,” she said. “Otherwise, I have to take expensive autos.” And she could only travel to her village in distant Bokaro when there were others with her. “I feel scared I will miss my station,” she said.

“Having a mobile phone, however, has made me acutely aware of my illiteracy,” she said. “Given that there are so many users like me, it is amazing that mobile phone companies have not yet come up with ways to make phones more accessible to us.” I mentioned that smartphones did have many such features, allowing, for example, users to add photographs and custom ringtones for contacts. Others could convert text to voice, allowing users to listen to their messages instead of reading them.

The household soon became involved in making the cook’s extremely basic phone more accessible to her. The whole exercise embarrassed her greatly. She repeatedly told us how her illiteracy had given her such a great deal of appreciation for education. “It is the only thing that can help people from my circumstances to rise to a better place in life,” she said. She told us that she had encouraged her daughter to study nursing, and she now had a decent hospital job. Her son had gone to college and now worked in an office.

If she understood how valuable education was, I said, maybe she would like to join some adult education classes. “I’m too old to learn anything new, but there’s something else I’ll do instead,” she said, futilely squinting at her screen. “I’ll exchange this phone for a smartphone.”