My Encounter with a Rotary Dial Telephone (Late 1950s) You know, having a telephone at home in the late fifties was a big deal. Only senior officers, police officials,doctors, journalists or the really well-off families had one. And those early phones weren’t like the ones with dials. Most were manual . You picked up the receiver, and a polite operator would come on the line and ask, “Number, please?” Then you’d tell him/her who you wanted to speak to, and he/she would connect you. Naturally, I had no idea what a rotary dial phone looked like, let alone how to use one. I’d only heard they existed in places like Mumbai and Delhi . ( Madras and Calcutta probably caught up a bit later.) Then, sometime around 1959, my family was traveling from Bareilly to Bangalore . My cousin came along too. We stopped for a couple of days in Bombay —yes, it was still Bombay then—to stay with my mother’s uncle. He worked in the Telephone Department . And that’s where the magic happened. There, in ...