Friday 17th October 2008

Today is Karva Chauth. For the last few days, the markets have smelled of henna paste as men and women sit in the gutter with little paper cones, painting women’s hands for the festival. The fine, burnt orange patterns of henna snake around fingers and knuckles into the intricate shapes of flowers and birds, turning a fierce brown on the palms of the hands where they are absorbed into the fleshy skin. “Yours doesn’t come off though,” laughed one of the women in the office, pointing to the slightly blueish tattoo of a swan on my hand, which was needled into my skin last year somewhere in the East Village.

This particular coworker wears red and silver bangles all the way up her forearms, stretching from wrist to elbow. It’s a tradition amongst some wives to wear them until the first anniversary of their wedding (in the shower too, I can confirm on further investigation). Karva Chauth is a marriage-related day. It derives from the story of Karva, whose husband (fairly carelessly it must be said) was swallowed by a crocodile whilst having a bath. Karva lassoed the offending reptile with some string, before taking him to Yama, the Lord of Death to ask him to send the crocodile to hell. Seeing the ‘power of a devoted wife,’ he did so, and freed the husband, who presumably found a new bathing spot from then onwards.

So today women fast from dawn til dusk to pray for the long lives of their husbands. Not even a glass of water passes their lips, which is quite a tough call in the Delhi heat. It might be considered a chauvinist practice, but for the fact that in return women get showered with jewellery and clothes, and fed by their husbands after dusk. And what woman in the West hasn’t starved themselves for a man who’ll buy them presents and dinner?

It’s a grumble my friend Neil, who is Indian-American, has with these festivals. “They always end in the girls getting presents,” he says. (Neil has sisters).

But while pious women stay at home avoiding the fridge, the tall, amazonian kind are still strutting down the catwalks at Delhi Fashion week. There to finish a couple of documentaries for the web, we meander in and out of silver trees and chairs draped in satin and other pointless installations, and duck in between besuited and unbesmirched buyers tipsily waving bulbous glasses of chardonnay in the air in circular motions.

Indian catwalk models are among the worst paid in the world. They are often not paid at all, and go through 12-day long fittings without seeing a single rupee. They often fail to get jobs on runways in New York, Milan or Paris, because neither their families nor their sensibilities will stomach the idea of appearing half-naked in public. In some of the catwalk shows today, the girls look nervous and attempt to pull down their skirts as they strut. Vinu is a fierce looking, six foot tall amazonian that had appeared at every show. She has cheekbones like razors and huge, scarleted lips that puckered with every vowel. “I’m here for I, me, myself,” she says, turning her better profile towards our camera. Presumably Vinu is not fasting for her husband today.

Ten minutes later she appears on the runway. Her long, brown, athletic legs make her look as if she could clear the whole thing in two strides. The wall of cameras flash away as she struts her way through the glittery path, wearing little more than a bra underneath her sari. But what a sari! Dripping with sequins and beads, wrapped around her taught, wiry frame, she looks like she was painted by Klimt. India hasn’t yet given into denim and viscose, despite it’s practicality in a country that is so poor and dirty. I finally understand why.

There are few white faces in the crowd, but among them is a heavily pregnant British journalist who is covering the event for Womens Wear Daily. She sits in the corner licking a chocolate ice cream cone. Normally, she writes for The Economist, she says. Later, we bump into a gaggle of blonde Swedish women, one of whom is a buyer for Ikea. They too stare around at the trendy deluge of Delhiites that mill around. It’s still seems a little incongruous standing at an international fashion week, full of people in diamonds and stilettos, in a country that has one of the highest number of citizens living below the poverty line.

It’s easy, in fact, as the Friday night champagne parties begin, to forget you are in India at all. It’s one of many such oubliesques around Delhi, mainly in the bars of five star restaurants (or otherwise in the city’s branch of TGI Fridays). It isn’t until we attempt to make our way back to the offices to edit the tape that, stuck in a gridlock, we remember it’s festival day. Moreover, it’s dinnertime and hundreds of couples all around us, sharing the seats of motorbikes, are off to their celebrations.

So today was women’s day. In kitchens over Delhi, mothers, aunts, wives and daughters sat in kitchens, making conversations and pujas and distracting themselves from the growlings of their stomachs. At Fashion Week, where fasting is an everyday matter for most, young girls bathed in attention. And tonight was a time for them all to let go: some to their dinners and some to their champagne. Both, I imagine, were toasting to longevity.

Thursday 16th October

If there’s something that Indians love, it’s bureaucracy. Papers, orderly queues, forms, documents. Today, we have to register with the Indian government, presumably to reassure them that we are not creating nail bombs for terrorists or opening a sweat shop for nimbled-fingered children to make Western-branded sports gear. As we queue at 8 am outside the Foreign Registration Office, it’s unclear whether any of our punctual, baggy-eyed group could cause subversion at the best of times. An American teenager with her hair in tiny dreadlock-plaits reads an Amitav Ghosh novel. A wiry, pasty Russian peers down his rimless glasses into the dusty air.

We’ve all signed our names on a torn-off piece of paper, next to hastily-scribbled numbers which tenuously denote our place in line. In the meantime, the office is not due to open for another 90 minutes. We leave Michelle glued to her Hindi phrasebook marking our place while we venture out for coffee. On our return, a scrum has appeared around the entrance, as people attempt to assemble themselves in numerical order. It’s like some corporate ice-breaking game, but instead of teamwork it’s every man for himself. Michelle is screaming at an Armenian who has brazenly placed himself in spot number three.

“No!” she shouts, as only a native New Yorker could, “that is NOT OK.” Her red-rimmed eyes are blazing, “There are NUMBERS!” Those in the back of the queue don’t know whether to nod in agreement or cower in embarrassment. A few Philippina women shrink in fear. The Armenian gentleman just grins. He is as resilient as a punchbag to this barrage of American abuse. A small, plump Kosovan child walks up and brazenly begins to bash at the tiger-shaped buckle on my belt, just inches from my crotch, while his mother looks on and laughs. The Afghan visitors, who have an entire line to themselves, push themselves up against the wall, keeping out of this particular diplomatic spat. “Chaos!” shouts the wan Russian with glee. “This country runs on chaos!”

The country does not, in fact, run on chaos. On the contrary, it is ground down by its own bureaucracy. It’s commonly known that the greatest lasting legacy of the British colonial days is not tea, or gin and tonic, but a civil service so complicated it would make Chairman Mao blush. Around 21 million Indian workers are employed by the government. They earn a modest amount more than the average Indian, but salaries can of course, be supplemented by a little bribery and extortion on the side. Moreover, it’s the kudos that matters. The paycheck that buys the new TV for Diwali is nice, but the uniform and ID card brings a level of deference that can be brought out at teatime every day of the year.

Government officers from indiscernible offices are chauffeur-driven in white Beetles around the city, small Indian flags waving on the dashboard before them. They pass effortlessly through no entry signs. Uniformed men, doing apparently nothing, stand at stop points, wearing headgear of varying degrees of flamboyance. Today, one stands at the entrance, peacock-preened, grasping the soggy scrap of paper with our numbers on it, It is meaningless in the face of his turban. What the man in the orange and green hat says, goes.

It’s not the last we’ll see of a government worker that day. In the afternoon, we wander around Connaught Place, looking for an office where we can book some train tickets to Jaipur. “What you looking for?” asks a man in Khaki trousers and sweat-free blue cotton shirt. We ignore him – we’re used to the hassle now and too hot and bothered to be polite. “No, look,” he says, “I work for government,” He takes out his wallet and shows me his ministry ID. “I take you to government office. They book tickets for you.”

On the way, our civil service friend explains his job proudly to me. He works in the tax department. He wants to move to London, he explains gently – to live with his brother in ‘big house in Hounslow’ - but the British government won’t give him a visa. “Until I find wife and make myself marriage,” he says, leaning over and opening the door to the travel agent. True to his word, the office is efficient and ten minutes latee we emerge, not only with transport to Jaipur, but a chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned car at our disposal for sight-seeing all weekend, and directions to the nearest bar to get a decent pint on draught.

Of course, not all Indian government officers are as straight-wheeling. Take as an example the heavy policeman, mounted on an enormous motorcycle, who decided to hail is a tuk tuk and happily (and illegally) cram four of us in the back for a ‘decent price’. The tuk tuk driver, nodding vigorously, gestured in agreement. In New Delhi, 400,000 rickshaw drivers are unlicensed and operate illegally. Suffering beatings and extortion from police is what keeps them on the road.

Under Article 311 of India’s constitution, it is almost impossible to fire or demote a government worker. This means that there are more civil servants than there are useful offices. It also means that no amount of imploring on the part of bribed constituents can bring them justice. Corruption is a way of life in India. In the 1970s, Indira Gandhi, when asked about the high levels of bribery and extortion in the government, simply replied: “What can you do about it? It’s a global phenomenon.”

Back in the queue for the Foreign Registration Office, tensions are running high. While Michelle tries to drum up a multinational force to push the Armenian to the back of the queue, I am still battling to protect my dignity against the giggling Kosovan kid. In the meantime, various office employees shuffle papers, make scummy chai, sweep non-existent detritus from the floor, and attempt to look busy, while anarchy descends between nations.

Tuesday 14th October 2008

The aesthetic of India Fashion Week is much as you would expect from any other world city: marble floors, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, wire-thin women prancing through the entrance with their certification hanging around their necks, tangling with their Louis Vuitton handbags. There are the flashes of cameras, the pouting of faces covered with outsize, bug-like sunglasses, even though it is shady enough inside.



Emporio Vasant Kunj is on the outskirts of Delhi, and the venue for half the shows in this year’s fashion week. It is a brand new building, purpose-built for the upper-middle class of Delhi: nothing but the highest end, biggest names of fashion couture: Dior, Chanel, DKNY. Here, the young and fabulously rich (and often fashionably-challenged) drop their Lexus off for valet parking and return a couple of hours later with their hatboxes and be-ribboned Gucci carrier bags. Less than five minutes’ drive down the road, we pass children returning from school with tattered backpacks, and women bent over with the weight of firewood to sell, and mouldy vegetables to buy.



We walk through the barriers, flashing our media passes with superior pride. The buyer’s entrance is bustling with the Eddies and Patsies of the Delhi glitterati, clutching glasses of Stoli Vodka and soda, and grabbing each others’ arms, whispering.

In the corridor outside, there is an art exhibition. It’s called ‘Wander Lust’, and devised by an unnamed artist. Each picture, blown up to a length of six feet or so, depicts an Indian villager – herd boys, women with wrinkled, careworn faces, girls with little flesh on their bones, men who stare, eye sockets protruding, into the camera. Each of them is depicted in India chic: expensive diamond rings through their noses, linen shirts, saris shining without a crease, in the finest of silk. A new trend is creeping into the nascent Indian fashion scene: peasant chic. India Vogue has just celebrated it’s first anniversary. In August, it published a controversial spread, styled to the nines, in which Indian peasants and beggar children were dressed in designer fashions. Small malnourished boys wore striped designer-kiddie striped jumpers. Young, tired mothers were smothered in angora. Women hanging off the back of motorcycles clutched VL-logoed handbags, while their husbands, at the front, were wearing tailored blazers. And on each of their faces, that familiar, haunting, hollow look that is so often the central appeal of charity leaflets. Instead of making poverty history, Delhi Fashion Week was making poverty sexy.



In a society where two thirds of the population are illiterate, and around 40% live below the poverty line, it’s a situation that’s easy to condemn and difficult to really understand. No matter how clean and fragrant their life lived in India, affluent Delhi-ites come face to face with the smell and grit of poverty every day. Children selling magazines at stoplights, weaving in and out of cars that narrowly scrape past them. Hunchbacked men, holding their bent arms out for a handful of rupees. Toddlers sitting in gutters that stink of sulfur and human excrement. And here we are, slipping on marble floors and gasping for a cappuccino.



In London, we are shielded from poverty. The beggars we do see are bums, we reassure ourselves. They are drunkards, or layabouts, who could get shelter and sign up for the dole if they want to. Real, dire, inescapable poverty is something we rarely, if ever, have to see firsthand. And so we fear it, and fetishize it. We leave it to Bono and Bob Geldof and Africa. We give to charities and cry out whenever human rights are broken but most of us don’t do anything useful about it anyway. We are scared of what we can’t see.

But every Indian knows what poverty looks like. It’s a way of life, even if it’s not their way of life. It’s not something to be afraid of, and it’s not something to be tiptoed around. The photoshoot might be tasteless, and it might never have run in American Vogue, but it’s not as stupid an editorial decision as it might first appear.



On the way back from our first experience of fashion week, we drop into a hotel to make a film for the newspaper. We’re videoing India’s most famous drummer, at a concert he’s giving as part of a hospitality event hosted by India’s largest telecommunications company. Somehow, we manage to impress said drummer, who invites us backstage to eat and drink and watch his show. We meet one of the most famous Bollywood composers and singers. We meet diplomats from various foreign consulates, who distribute their business cards and demand ours, inviting us to travel and drink wine and come to parties in five star hotels. Barely is our back turned before our large tulip-shaped wine glasses are refilled with the finest Shiraz and Chardonnay by waiters with scarlet turbans, wearing impeccable white suits. Driving back in the dark, more than a little tipsy, it is impossible to see, in the shadows, the camps of children living under tarpaulin, and fathers crouched by the roadside on thin moth-eaten mattresses, waiting for the night to come. They aren’t dressed in Prada polo necks today.

The gap between the most wealthy and the poorest of Indian society is gargantuan. Women get a french polish in a five-star spa, where barely a hop, skip and jump away, kids sell coconut segments to tuk tuk drivers and their passengers, before settling down for the night on an ancient blanket. But what to do is another question. The answer is not to drip them in diamonds, but it’s also not to take out a 100 rupee standing order to a charity that will probably never deliver your money to the right place. There’s no point in covering guilt with an ineffectual contribution.

As the sun sets over the stage of the hotel, we swat the flies from our bowls of chocolate mousse and think back to the photos in the Emporio Mall. What next for the anonymous faces of suffering, now such a worn-out phrase that they are considered iconic enough for the fashion industry? Whatever the answer, it probably won’t be found in the Stoli Vodka tent.

Monday 13th October

“The thing about India is…” It was about the fourth time in the last two minutes our host had said it. We are sitting in a restaurant in Connaught Place, a plaza area which can best be described as the Oxford Circus of New Delhi, but with better food. Some family friends of a friend had taken us out for a sumptuous dinner. When you are ex-pats, the most tenuous of links become your comrades, such is the common bond of alienness shared, and the pool of likely acquaintances shrunk. And now we were the honoured recipients of one of the best meals we’d ever had: lamb, tandoori chicken, spicy paneer, perfectly cooked lentils, naan glazed with creamy butter, parathas sprinkled with gentle spices. A restaurant, I find, can always be rated by the standards of its toilet facilities. Here, before you can reach the top of the stairs, an old man smiles and greets you, before dashing into the cubicle before you with a handful of paper towels to wipe down every possible surface.

Back at the table, I sit across from our host again. He begins, “the thing about India is…” and launches into a conversation about India’s pre-colonial history. He regales us with tales of pre-colonial kings and queens and princes, of the triumphs of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Indian national pride is one of the country’s strongest assets. It comes partly from an economic rivalry with China, and partly from a deservedly-held self-congratulation in being an emerging, billion-strong democracy despite it’s size, poverty, and the fact that it has only had 50 years to do so.

“Look outside at the people here begging,” our host says, pointing to the door. On our way in, one of the beggars who swarm Connaught Place in the evening had crept around the group, before being severely scolded by our host and sent away. He continues, “no one out there is insane, though. They are poor, but they are not insane like back in your country.”

The average beggar on the street may not be as crazy as most New York bums, or soaked in Special Brew like the bearded men living below Waterloo Bridge. But mental illness as a whole is a big problem in India. And the country is struggling to keep up with demand. A recent report by the National Human Rights Commission of India found that around 3 million people suffered from some kind of mental illness nationwide. By 2010, it is set to overtake heart disease as the biggest killer in the country. Every day the Times of India reports details of at least two or three suicides in Delhi. This is a city obsessed. In India, if it can be proven that someone drove the deceased to their death, the charge is murder.

The same report also found that there were only 29,000 beds nationally to treat mental illness, meaning that roughly 90% of people are not getting the medical attention they need. The fallout between people needing, and people receiving treatment, especially for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, was seriously lacking; that is, among the poorest classes that is, and not the wealthier who could afford their own personal shrink.

There is a view in the West that Indians are spiritual, centred beings who do yoga every morning, ayurveda in the afternoons, and visit their guru’s ashrams regularly for guidance. In fact, Indians are the same as any of us. They suffer from the same biological imbalances, the same reactions to trauma, and the same work and family pressures. And there is an increasing interest in mental health too. In the city, people attribute disorders to the breakdown of traditional family ties, to the increasing speed of life, and to the pressures of work, not least in the current economic climate. But these are common scapegoats. Doctors are taking mental illness increasingly seriously, not just for the average commuter but for the poorest, most downtrodden village people.

Back at our table in Connaught Place, we are far from any village, and cordoned off from the threat of any beggars, mentally stable or otherwise. We drain our wine glasses and shift our full bellies to the waiting cars, and roll into the back seat. I sit next to our host’s wife, who engages me in conversation about her recently-started career: turns out she is a hypnotherapist.

Sunday 12th October 2008

Farizabad is an hour’s drive outside the city. On the way we pass the enormous dome of the Hindi temple Ashram, which is brand new and comes complete with hydro-tour ride. We pass hospitals, bowling alleys, the call centers that have fallen silent as American customers sleep on the other side of the world.

We drop into a roadside café, where truck drivers eat dosas and samosas and sweets. The tarpaulin pulled over the top creates small corners in which bugs hide in piles of dust. The cans of coke we buy are crusted with something similar. No trail mix or kendal mint bars for us here, so we buy a few backets of bourbon biscuits and head on our way.

Farizabad advertises itself as a ‘tourist resort’ and there’s a sign on the right of the car park for a ‘bar and restaurant’ we won’t even bother to follow, even though we’re all starving already. A sign for ‘boating and sailing’ points to a dried-up stagnant river in the middle of some marshland. In it, water buffalo toss algaed water into the air with their snouts. Strangely, someone decided it would be a good idea to sell camel rides, and two of the dehydrated beasts lift their heads dejectedly as we pass. Children run around us, their mothers pulling them forward for us to take their picture, clicking their fingers in the air in front of the faces in that universal, futile attempt to make children look at a camera.



The Indians we meet can’t quite understand why we would want to go hiking. Why walk up a pile of rocks, just to walk down them again? We attract the attention of a gang of boys playing cricket beside the water buffalo, and they want us to join, but we politely decline. Indians are the world’s cricketers, and even without our hiking boots on, our certain thrashing would frankly be embarrassing. But where are we going? They ask. As we point to the distant horizon they are even more confused.



So, covered in burrs and sporadically emitting shrieks every time we loose a footing, we hike to the top of a small hill. We stop to survey the safety of our next step, try the solidity of the next rock, and try and find some kind of non-thorned bracken to hold on to. In the meantime, two skinny brown ten year-olds have spotted us from below, and leap like nymphs from boulder to boulder. They are now standing above us, looking down quizzically. They leapfrog before us, singing softly and occasionally asking for biscuits and money. We give them some bourbon biscuits. A few hundred yards to our left, women are working amid the hot stones, hacking away at the bracken. They all stare at us in confusion as we snap pictures of each other and giggle as we attempt to climb trees. The boys munch and look on in bemusement.



India is beautiful. It’s always been the dream of photographers and travel writers, even the most inexperienced of whom find themselves with the Midas touch, writing about maharajahs, and taking the mandatory pictures of beautiful dusty children adorned with jewels and paint. There’s a mystique that touches GAP year students and young travellers, and infuses in them a spiritual ephiphany that they return home and evangelise to their friends and family. India has created music, dance and art that the West finds irresistable. And here it’s humdrum. Incense is burned like charcoal. The embroidered and bejewelled saris women wear to work are ‘only everyday styles’. Men sit atop elephants which saunter down the inside lane of the road, and nobody bats an eyelid. Candles and colours and music and dancing happen every day and everywhere. It’s Indian Ikea. The fact that it might be at all special both confuses and delights locals. As far as they are concerned, there is no mysticism or magic about it. As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, once said, “To a Western observer our civilisation appears as all metaphysics, as to a deaf man piano playing appears to be mere movement of fingers and no music.”



It’s easier to feel that you are part of generations of foolish Westerners who, standing agog, have bought into the idea of some kind of magical Indianism. But, when you sit in a tree, on top of a mountain, looking over at the vast scape of trees and strange-shaped birds, children playing cricket and buffalo crouching in the water, you realise that it’s even easier to be seduced by it. And it’s pointless trying to resist.

Sunday 12th October 2008

India holds an ongoing love affair with the cellular phone. There are 289 million mobile phone connections in the country, and it’s growing at a rate of 9 million a month. Compare that to the rate of internet penetration at a measly 4% and it’s clear that no one’s being lured away too quickly. Every Indian has a mobile. Calls are cheap, and every day pop, techno and hip-hop ring tones buzz from pockets and bags. It’s perfectly acceptable to answer a phone in the middle of a meeting, and politicians have even been known to answer them live on TV. Like a sixth former with a new boyfriend, Indians will quite happily to send twenty or thirty text messages a day. Get yourself a handset in India, and you’ll soon be deluged with multiple daily ads, and cold calls, and sometimes calls that will, inexplicably, just play music in your ears. Indians send each others text messages of all kinds, about births, marriages and deaths, but nothing is more beloved than the text joke. There is a text joke of the day in our morning newspaper (today’s: Q: When does an Indian man do his exercise? A: Sucking his stomach in when the ladies walk by). Kids walk down the road selling maps to tourists with one hand and texting with the other, taxi drivers answer their phones sometimes more than once a trip (though take note: they always pull over first).

We, however, do not yet have mobile phones. Tightened national security means it is prohibitively difficult to register for one, and so for the last fortnight we have been at the mercy of our bosses to get them. This means that we are effectively social and professional pariahs. We cannot register for various services, since they don’t accept landline numbers, and we can’t make friends, since, well, friends text each other. It’s the daily gripe at the breakfast table in our house, perhaps principally because we’re having trouble getting internet too and it we’ve all forgotten the skills needed to actually talk to each other in person.

So, right now, we’re pressing our silent faces up to the windows of the networked world, and taking a peer inside.

In a sense, India has every reason to be obsessed with the phone call. A large part of their business is based on them. There are hundreds of call centers in India, employing an estimated 350,000 people. These are night workers, young people who by day are good Indian children to their parents, helping make daal and saying puja, and by night they are Americans. “Rajesh” becomes “Ricky”; “Subash” becomes “Sam”. They are given accent coaching to replace their Delhi-speak with perfect American drawl or London twang. They are infused with company values and the impression that they have a job which makes them upwardly mobile and in some way part of a larger, more sophisticated machine than if they worked for a regular Indian company. The better call centres have company incentives and group bonding days, yoga classes, relaxation rooms.

But reality bites when a phone call comes in. Any one who has ever spent a dreary shift in a call centre will know what demeaning, spirit-crushing work it really is. An American housewife will call, demanding to know why her washing machine won’t work, shouting that it is the third time she has called in 24 hours and that it must be your incompetence that is to blame. Or a British businessman will call, screaming that he can’t get online, swearing and cursing that he can’t seem to get through to anyone who is not Indian these days.

A novel chronicling the lives of these young people - Indian by day, Western by night – has sold more than a million copies across the country and has been made into a movie that is released here this month. Priced at 90 rupees (around £1) and available in supermarkets, the book has brought pop fiction to a generation that has not previously been known for it’s love affair with reading. One Night at the Call Centre by Chetan Bhaghat chronicles just that: an evening to early morning shift in an office team of six young people, who are tormented by their lack of identity, their insular nocturnal world, and their love-hate affair with the Western world. They go to clubs, drink Long Island Ice Teas one after another, throw stones through the window of Pizza Hut, and have sex in cars. Then they are flattened beneath the hierarchy of work, try to earn enough money to please their parents, struggle with arranged marriages. And it all comes to a head when, in the early hours of the morning they receive a call from God.

“Now, do you know what is the most important call in the world?”
“No,” Vroom said. Everyone else shook their heads.
“The inner call,” God said.
“The inner call?” Everyone said in unison.
“Yes, the little voice inside that wants to talk to you. But you can only hear it when you are at peace – and then too it is hard to hear it. Because in modern life the networks are too busy. The voice tells you what you really want.”

The voice of God, if it is to be heard, has to wrestle not with pop music, or with sex, with money, or with drugs. In India, the voice of God has to wrestle with Vodafone.

Still, without a mobile phone, none of us have yet found our religious epiphany. And inner call or no inner call, when we find ourselves at peace, all we really want is to send a text message.