May 28, 2024
Chetan's Story: Tring-Tring
The phone rang, a clear tring-tring cutting through the silence. It was my friend, calling back after I'd asked him to test our new line.The very first call on our own phone in our own house. I must have been 15 or 16.
Back in India in the 80's, for a middle-class family like mine, a phone at home was almost a dream. Even if the family could afford the expense, the waiting lists were endless. Those phones weren’t just gadgets; they were status symbols. You needed "connections" if you wanted a connection.
Just as I was preparing for college, things were changing. Our house finally got that eagerly awaited black bakelite beast. The thrill of making those first calls and sharing the news with friends is still vivid in my mind. To call that a life-changing event (especially for a teenager) would be an understatement.
Later, grad school in the US: every call home was precious. Every minute had a cost measured in dollars, not cents. Every word we spoke, every sentence, had to mean something. Still, I felt fortunate. Just a decade earlier, international students could only rely on letters, taking weeks to arrive. You know, "snail mail".
Fast forward to 2024, and where are we? Swiping through apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, sharing pictures without a thought, jumping into video chats from every corner of the world. All this was stuff of science fiction just twenty years ago. On par with ubiquitous jetpacks or space travel. I'm still waiting to book my flight to Mars on Travelocity, but a globe spanning video chat? It's just a tap away. Just as Marshall McLuhan promised back in the '60s, we, at long last, truly are residents of one sprawling global village.
This story, though mine, is also yours. Whether you're from the era of dial tones or grew up cradling iPhones before toys (like my kids). Don't we all remember the passage of time by how we communicated? Maybe you don’t remember letters, postage stamps and expensive long distance calls. Maybe for you, your youth meant SMS and MySpace and playing snake on your Nokia. This is what my co-founder, Diana Fong, remembers as her life growing up. Either way, words and pictures we shared back then, shape the very memories that formed us. I still remember the feel of that heavy bakelite handset pressed to my ear. My kid's generation probably remembers the first hand-me-down iPhone they used to watch their cartoons or play their favorite games on. The way we communicate shapes us, defines us. Medium is the message, indeed.
Honestly though? If medium is the message... then the message today is confusion. Just because we can talk to our loved ones any moment of day or night, doesn't mean we're making sense. More chat is often more chaos, just digital noise. Apps like WhatsApp and iMessage have undoubtedly revolutionized how we communicate. But for all their convenience, they still lack something essential – the ability to capture and curate the enduring narrative of our family lives. As Deepika, my wife, and I often discussed in the years past, our family practically lives our lives by WhatsApp and yet, at least once a day, we were frustrated by its limitations. We needed a chat app that did a lot more than just an endless scroll of messages. Over time an idea began to take shape. A chat app that my own family would love. And here it is now. We call it FlaiChat. More about it in part 2 of my post.
