Presenting the omnipresent yellow public phone. Drop a coin and it is at your service! When I moved to Bangalore in 2005, without a local number to make calls on, I was dependent on the yellow phone for communication. So was my wife, who used these phones to call me whenever she ran out of mobile prepaid limit. With the mobile phone revolution and its easy affordability, everyone has a mobile phone now – and sometimes even more. The mobile phone certainly draws a curtain over the yellow pay-phone’s future. Shop keepers who made an easy Rs 250 to Rs 300 in coins each day, inform me that the income is now a trickle. Even Rs 20 to 30 a day is a miracle on the service. One notices them vanishing from places where they were the landmark. I decided to document this swiftly disappearing phenomenon and life around pay phones, before they vanish from the landscape of urban life completely.
Bio:
Arindam Thokder is a Bangalore-based street photographer with a keen sense for contrast and color. His main interests are documenting everyday life, social issues and conflicts, charitable aid projects and the cultures of various parts of India. However it’s street photography that he enjoys most now a day.
Arindam is a member of “That’s Life”, an Indian street photography collective and “Street-Photographers.com” which is an international collective of photographers.
