Day of the nomad? Not really

A-ha! What else? Oprah enquired. Well, Scott had told Amber he was in a certain business that took him all over the world. And that he had only given her his mobile phone number. ‘‘Only a mobile phone number!’’ Oprah repeated with a significant look at the audience, ‘‘only a mobile phone number!’’

There it was the clincher: never trust a man who only offers a mobile phone number.

Consider this in the context of our rapidly changing world. There’s the ad of the two rather comic gents trawling the globe with their IBM gizmos — one minute resting at a cafe in Paris, the other walking the streets of Tokyo. They are the representatives of our emerging anytime, anywhere world. The modern citizen with his cellphone, laptop, credit card, satellite TV and passport.

Movement is the mantra of our times. A white paper in the UK on migration patterns brought out some years ago had estimated that between 1992-3 and 1997-8, arrivals to Britain (of regular travelers as well as migrants) had gone up from 55 million to 80 million. And thousands (Germany had a high of 136,000) were seeking asylum in all the major European countries every year.

Migrants are the more extreme travelers. Every contemporary trend seems geared to generate traffic on an everyday basis. Closer home one finds it in the proliferation in hotels; the emergence of a standardised, sanitised mall-multiplex-coffee chain culture for the ‘Accidental Tourist’ type of change-shunning traveler, private airlines and their price wars, taxis, sleek buses and superfast trains. Lifestyle and furniture stores in big cities these days offer a whole new range of products: lightweight benches and sofas, bookcases with adjustable shelves, all purpose cane boxes, rods that stick on walls with vacuum pressure, slim TV sets, moveable stuff, adaptable stuff, with a sense of impermanence about it. And magazines carry stories about the flexible workplace and advice on how to set up your own office anywhere.

So is the day of the nomad finally here?

Well, not quite. Tried applying for a credit card, cellphone or gas connection recently? You would probably have been asked to produce some or all of the following: ration card, voter id, office address, property share certificate, rent agreement or other proof of residence. Applied for a new passport or renewal of old one? You would have had to submit references from neighbours and wait for the police to come checking. Most people would agree that in view of fraud and terrorism such precautions on the part of companies and governments are reasonable. The point is not so much about reason as about perceptions.

It is interesting that Oprah in her show did not find Amber’s blindness to her boyfriend’s behaviour, his conversation, or anything else — including the news about Scott’s missing wife blazing from every channel — anywhere close to significance as the fact that he gave her only a cellphone number. Her emphasis understandably is on the fact that he would not give his girlfriend the number for his residence where his wife presumably could have taken the call.

But what if Scott had not been an adulterous husband and murderer?What if he had been exactly what he said he was: a bachelor, itinerant salesman available only over a cellphone — attributes that would fit a growing tribe of individuals the world over? Would he still have been deemed untrustworthy?

Probably and it is because of the strange contradiction of our times and one that Winfrey seems to express unequivocally in her response to her guest’s confession about the mobile phone: that while we embrace mobility we trust only fixity. Permanence, conformism, sociability are still what we base our security on. We have not yet evolved new ways of assessing credibility that would match our fast changing lifestyles and attitudes.