‘Phone Romeos’ Dialing For Love
LUCKNOW, India — In a glass-sided call center, police constables clicketyclack on computer keyboards, on the trail of a particularly Indian sort of criminal.
The “phone Romeo,” as he is known here, calls numbers at random until he hears a woman’s voice, in the hope of striking up a romantic attachment. Among them are overeager suitors (“Can I recharge your mobile?”), tremulous supplicants (“I am talking to you, madam, but my body is shaking”) and the heavy breather (“I want to do the illegal things with you”).
Intentionally dialing wrong numbers is a labor-intensive way to find a girlfriend. But it is increasingly common in a range of countries — Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh and India are examples — where traditional gender segregation has collided head- on with a wave of cheap new technology.
India is justly proud of its mobile-phone revolution. Call tariffs are among the world’s cheapest, and competition has sent the price of broadband plummeting. An estimated 680 million Indians use cellphones now, with three million new ones coming online every month. India’s leaders promote mobile platforms as a sign of social progress, a better way to distribute subsidies and obtain information about health care and agricultural conditions.
An unintended consequence is that social barriers between men and women are collapsing. Reports of phone stalking have increased, leading to growing complaints of harassment. But an unknown number are successful, resulting in what an anthropologist has labeled “wrong-number relationships.”
“It’s a new thing,” said Julia Q. Huang, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who has written a paper on the practice among young women in Bangladesh. “It’s covert, it’s risky, it’s experimenting with that outside world which they don’t have much access to.”
At the police call center in Lucknow, roughly 700 calls come in every day, mostly from women complaining of persistent calls. The Hindustan Times recently reported that phone recharging outlets were selling the numbers of young women to interested