The Indian Railways proposes to introduce a “mobile-based wake-up call system for passengers”, I read recently. This could mean one of two things: wake up sleeping passengers on the train so they won’t miss their station; or wake up soon-to-be passengers sleeping in their homes, who have booked tickets for an early morning train. Either way, the news item makes me recall the method employed by our family, and every other family in the country, to make sure we got up on time to catch a train. If you’re above thirty you can chant along with me one-two-three: “The alarm clock.”
Those below thirty can imagine a cartoon sketch of a circular timepiece, slightly askew, levitating above the table, with wavy lines around it to indicate vigorous movement, and a blurb that says “Brrrrrr-ring!” The rest of us don’t need to visualise it. We can hear it. Hear it all the way down the passage of thirty years or more, the sound that only a Kumbakarna could sleep through, the unforgettable clangour of the alarm clock. (We called it the alarum, which is not an Indianism, by the way, but a legit Brit word that moulds itself nicely to the Indian tongue.)
Father would ‘keep the alarum’ on the night before the journey — by bus, car or train (only the rich went by aeroplane). In the wee hours, just as you were sinking into another cushiony dream, you would be pounded awake by a remarkable din. Whichever room of the house you were in you heard it loud and strong. So did all your neighbours. The alarum lived up to its name, i.e. it truly alarmed you. You shot out of bed wild-eyed and palpitating. Compare this to the proposed wake-up call of the Railways — a message meekly beeping on your mobile phone. Father would have scoffed at it. In fact, Father wouldn’t have believed his eyes if he’d lived long enough to see a pocket-size phone being used for practically everything except to phone. A phone to tell the time? Our version of it was a service provided by the Post and Telegraphs department where we dialled a number to hear a recorded voice announce the precise hour, minute and second. A phone to wake us up? Once again the good old P&T came to our aid; we called a number to request them to give us a ring in the early a.m., much like the wake-up call from housekeeping staff in a hotel.
The only two reasons for an alarum shattering the pre-dawn torpor of a small-town neighbourhood were a vacation trip or annual exams. The examinee would bash the clock on its head to shut it up, and turn over to go back to sleep, only to be rudely shaken five minutes later by an irate parent. The very purpose of a clock alarm was defeated by weak-willed individuals turning it off at the first ring, but this fatal shortcoming was rectified in a 21st century invention. Gauri Nanda (a woman of Indian origin?) designed a clock that walks. Clocky rings while it totters away and rings while it stumbles around the room in a random fashion; it then finds an obscure corner to hide in, still ringing diabolically. By the time the blurry-eyed sleeper has located it she is wide awake and in no mood to hit the snooze button.
Today the cellphone alarm is perhaps most widely used but the problem is that you can’t blindly swat it; you have to open at least one eye to make your choice: switch off or snooze. Some of you might remember the opposite of Snooze: Slumber. The bedside clock-radio had a Slumber option that allowed you to listen to your favourite station for some more time, at the end of which it would automatically shut down while you would presumably have dozed off.
What a restful way of entering the arms of Morpheus. Nothing restful about the waking up, if Father had his way. He was a firm votary of alarms that created rackets fit to raise the dead. When musical alarms came into the market he dismissed them outright. They’ll only lull you into deeper sleep, he said. He was wrong.
It is a myth that only jarring noises can rouse you; music does it equally well. It’s just that we were more familiar with crude electrical and mechanical noises — the gong or bell madly pealing to mark the end of school, the buzzer at the front door that caused you to jump out of your skin. They later gave way to electronic noises, which may not be as harsh but are just as insistent. If an old-fashioned alarm clock is like a hammer on your brain, an electronic beep is a needle boring through it.
Which brings me back to the Railways and its wake-up messages. They are bound to alert passengers all right, but isn’t the whole operation something of a logistical nightmare? Hundreds of thousands of travellers all over India take trains or get off them in the small hours every day. Most of them would have mobile phones (who doesn’t, these days?). Er, wouldn’t it be simpler for them to set their own alarms?
