A friend of mine was looking quite downcast and was clearly unhappy about something. After a little prodding, he revealed the reason and pronounced that the Government was “unfair”. I thought he was referring to the latest fuel price hike. “Why 100?,” he asked me. “What 100?,” I asked him. The petrol price, though steadily rising, was yet to reach the three-figure mark. Then it hit me.

He was talking about the TRAI's restriction on the number of SMS a day to 100. But does he really send 100 SMS? “I send at least 200,” he said. Does that mean he spends the whole day texting? “I prefer communicating through messages,” he said. Why? Because each call costs at least 30-40 paise per minute. And free calls are restricted to few hundred a month. So he has subscribed to a ‘booster SMS pack' that allows him to send unlimited SMS every day.

For him, the restriction meant he would have to reduce his “conversation” with his friends. Were all his friends unhappy? “No. Only two or three. The rest have other options,” he said. Other options? Many of his friends had mobiles with GTalk installed and had also subscribed to unlimited GPRS packs. Some of them even had other clients like WhatsApp, Nimbuzz, eBuddy and Palringo. They had 100 free SMS plus all the apps.

He said some of his friends used GTalk more as there were multiple options for the messages to reach - desktops and laptops, mobiles and tablets. With WhatsApp, they could even add attachments. Those left out were guys like my friend who still had basic mobilephones. He said he felt increasingly left out as more and more friends upgraded to higher end mobiles. The 100 SMS restriction was the last straw. When I saw him a few days later, he was comparatively cheerful. He had decided to upgrade his mobile, so that he could use the apps and stop abusing the Government.

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