In India there s one thing that connects us all as one be it a farmer irrigating his fields in Punjab or an IT guru working at a Multinational Company (MNC) based in Bangalore. A bollywood actor in Mumbai to modern day youth in a Delhi University. All are tied on together with one pure string of belief, spiritualism, culture and Mobiles. Yes, thats right slowly mobiles have made their way into the spiritual world and are now offering us amazing services which not only connect us to our spiritual side but also makes it easy for us to stay connected to the rest of the world. So is this way of getting connected with our roots something good or is the corporate world playing a dirty game with innocent people to sell their fancy products? Lets find out:

The Up Side

These days mobiles have improved in their technology so fast that it has now enabled us to carry our hymns (shabads, seminars etc.) as music format and enable us to listen to it whenever we want to. The coming Nokia N96 has DVB-H which can enable us to even watch serials like Ramayana (on NDTV Imagine), Mahabharat (on 9X) and Aasth Channels straight from our mobiles. But there is still time and these things look a bit far away at present but Im sure this is going to be the case in the coming years. But there is one catch to all this! With the benefit of getting a phone along with these capabilities mobiles these days have gone NUTS i.e. they first are really expensive (as I could easily get a music player like an iPod way cheap) and even if you by them, they tend to be too complicated which you sure can handle but your parents would have a hard time getting through. Not to mention what grandparents would have to go through to get them working. To make this point more understandable here is an example, my father is so busy that he hardly has time to learn the different complexities in a mobile and my grandmother is too old to figure out the way even though she has a lot of spare time and always ends up calling me for help. (I somehow see that touch screen coupled with local language (on the likes of 5800 XpressMusic can make things a little simple, but how simple we will have to wait and see)

Not only mobiles but a whole lot of GSM and CDMA 1x service provides in India (Bharti AirTel, Vodafone, TATA and Reliance etc.) are offering us services to listen to hymns and even get updated daily quotes from our religious books even on our cheap handsets which do not offer video or music capabilities. These services not only connect the concept of mobiles with our grandparents but also help the youth to get in touch with its spiritual self. But these too have a catch, they too are a little expensive to subscribe and only a minority of mobile users subscribe to these services.

The Down Side

Let me start with service provides first. Recently we have seen some of the service providers advertising their products with commercial based on religious settings. For example a son calls his grandfather for a temple and makes him hear the ringing of the bells from his mobile. Now the point here was that the network coverage has improved, but the use of the bell made a direct connection with not only young but old people too. Im not a marketing expert but is this right to use our spiritual beliefs to market their products?
Now we also have a few religious programs on TV that are watched by millions and we find the likes of Nokia sponsoring them thus giving its name a visual feed to all watching.

This is what I had noticed the past month as we are heading in for a festive season here in India, I believe not only mobiles but all corporate houses make use of these promotional stunts having no respect for the consumers belief, for just getting those extra sales.

When will this stop. Is this the way it will be. The point I want to address here is that having your spiritual content on your phone is good but mobile phone companies and service providers using our religious beliefs as a tool to market their products is bad.

My take
I would love to have my religious content on my cellular device but I cant really see a point why mobile companies are using this as a tool for main stream commercials to market their product. But this is not all, I need your opinion on this too.

Do you feel the same? Have any service providers or mobile companies done this in your country? Or am I over reacting to this? Please feel free the share your views.