E.T., Phone Home!(phone cards and international telephone calls)

Byline: Shashi Tharoor

I had just hung up the phone after one of my weekly telephone conversations with my mother in India, realizing with some bemusement that my call had clocked in at just under an hour. Three decades or so ago, when I came to the United States as a student, such a call would have been inconceivable. In those days, calling India from America cost $12 a minute.

The homesick Indian students I knew therefore never called home. They couldn't afford to. Most of us were here on scholarships; once tuition and room rent had been deducted, we lived on less than $100 a month, and a one-minute call home, even for a very special occasion, meant skipping a couple of meals. One ingenious Calcuttan friend--let's call him Chattopadhyaya--devised an elaborate stratagem to give his folks news of his welfare. He would ask the operator to make a collect call to India, where his parents were primed to say they couldn't understand the operator's mangling of his unpronounceable moniker. At this point he'd chime in, saying to the operator, "My name is Chattopadhyaya!" in English, followed by several phrases of rapid-fire Bengali, communicating all the essential news. His family would then respond to the operator that they did not know the caller and declined to accept the charges. Mission accomplished at no cost, Chattopadhyaya would wallow for hours afterward in the luxury of knowing his parents 8,000 miles away had actually heard his voice. You could do this only so often from home before the phone company caught on, so Chattopadhyaya pulled his stunt from several different pay phones around campus.

What a difference technology makes. The decade of deregulation and innovation in the 1990s saw a steady decline in the price of international telephone calls from the United States. At first Indian expatriates had to ...