When BPL had its monopoly in India in the consumer electronics sector, I just hated the company. It had its joint venture with Sanyo, and people said that when you get from BPL is what you get from Sanyo. Well, I hate Sanyo too. I haven’t heard that name for long, but when I was around 10 years of age, my father bought me a single speakered mono cassette player which I used for around a year, and then it broke. just fell apart. Cheap plastic you know. It was a made in Chandni Chowk piece branded with the Sanyo logo.
Well, I can’t blame Sanyo for that. And India is my country and I have an office in Old Delhi. So I can’t blame the wonderful dilliwale either. That was the reason I hated Sanyo. Then, after BPLs JV period ended with Sanyo, my father bought me a BPL double deck cassette player with 100 W PMPO and it had a sub woofer too. I still have that subwoofer speaker alone lying around with my electronic components box here at home. This music system worked for around 2 years and one fine morning the subwoofer failed, and so did the mechanisms that play the cassette. I was good at electronics at that time, and I couldn’t do a thing, as the only things that I saw on the circuit boards were perfectly working resistors and capacitors, and ICs. All, Japanese ICs which you will never get anywhere outside Sanyo’s campus, in a place like Tamil Nadu.
After these two incidents, I hated BPL.
The first mobile connection that I got was Aircel as I did not like to go for a BPL Mobile connection though several people told me that BPL was a lot better than Aircel. After around 6 months of unsatisfactory service from Aircel, I decided to give BPL Mobile a try and I just loved it and stuck to their service for the next 3 years untill Reliance Mobile came.
I just loved the name. BPL MOBILE. I loved their logo and used to keep that as my Operator Logo on the nokia phones that I had those days. I didn’t like the names that ended with Cel and Tel. I liked the word Mobile.
In those days I could not afford 2 mobile phones. No one used to. Today though I have around 4 mobiles and a landline always close to me, one for Delhi, one for the South, one for Singapore and HK and one for family and friends, and the landline for Pondicherry. So, when reliacne came with its wonderful offers, I moved to reliance. Bought my first color handset, an LG flip phone that had a built in answering machine and stuff. It was a lovely handset, and they dont make phones like that anymore.
Had some billing issues with Mukesh Ambani at that time just like most others, so I decided to move back to GSM, and again my choice was a BPL number, untill BPL in Tamil Nadu and kerala were taken over by Hutch. I liked the name of Hutch too, and their logo in Orange, but when they changed that to Pink, I quit Hutch and moved to Airtel.
Just see how much the brands and their logs and names have influenced me.
When Hutch was taken over by Vodafone, I moved back to Vodafone, and had bought 2 numbers for myself and 2 numbers for my associate in Coimbatore. With that association ended a few months ago, those numbers came back to me. No More Airtel.
BPL Mobile still remained in Mumbai, and I tried my best to get their number. Just to see the logo on my phone, and perhaps to make calls while roaming, but I couldn’t get one. Thanks to the terrorists, a man cannot get a number from outside his circle or ask one of his friends to get it for him.
This morning, I felt like looking at the BPL Mobile logo and went to bplmobile.com, and found that they have changed the name of their service to Looooooooooop mobile. I completely heart broken. Such a lovely name, gone. A name that I proudly used to tell when I was asked who my operator was. BPL Mobile. The brand is completely gone. What the fuck does Loop Mobile mean anyways? Looping people?