Not having a mobile phone today gets you thrown into the category of cavemen. People nowadays don't even ask if you have a mobile phone, they just get down to asking your number and give you this strange look of disgust coupled with astonishment if you tell them you don't have one. I remember visiting my local vegetable vendor lately and borrowing his mobile phone to call my mom at home - just to ask her if she needed me to buy a certain vegetable. I recollect the days when I had first cast my eyes on the first few mobile phones; they were big as my compass-box in school and heavy as a hammer. You could've killed somebody with it. It was something that our military could use if they ran out of bullets. That hammer however became the dream gadget for every teenager in the next decade or when we all wanted to have one suspended around our waist. The mobile phone has just crept ever so slowly into our daily lives now and without our knowledge, become an extension of our physical existence. -QUDSIA JAMAAL, Islamabad, via e-mail, November 24.