Oct. 24: Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house, and hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got cellphones.

Well, not everyone. For a hardy few that choose to ignore cellphones, life is a pocketful of quarters, missed connections and a smug satisfaction of marching to a different ring tone.

For Linda Mboya, 32, of Brooklyn who works with a non-profit group, it also involves never letting sleeping dogs lie. A friend who lives on the top floor of a house has a perpetually broken apartment buzzer. So Mboya makes noise to disturb the dogs that live on the first floor, who bark and announce her arrival to her friend.

“This system works pretty well,” Mboya said, though the dogs’ owners might disagree.

For many people, cellphones have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver email messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio.

After 20 years, 85 per cent of adult Americans have cellphones, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to the Federal Communications Commission, cellphones caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers.

India had 45.7 crore mobile subscribers as on August 31 this year, according to telecom regulator Trai, if one included fixed wireless phones (such as Tata Indicom’s Walky) too. The subscriber base went up by 1.5 crore in August alone.

Americans who still do not have mobiles tend to be older or less educated or those unable to afford phones.

But there is also a smaller set of adults — the “refuseniks” — who resist cellphones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way ring tones, tiny keyboards and screens disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savour their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, 34, a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, since he doesn’t have even a landline at home.

When his mother recently went to hospital, the family’s communication plan went into action: his mother called his sister, who sent him an instant message on his computer, to which he replied with a call using Skype over the Web.

When Han travels for work, he prepares his boss with a list of ways to reach him and colleagues to call if he is unreachable, a modern-day version of Tony Roberts’s neurotic character giving minute-by-minute updates of where he would be reachable in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam.

Far from being technology-resistant, Han makes a living blogging about interior design and tech gadgets. He initially got rid of his cellphone to save money, but “I feel I benefit by living in the moment and not having a ring or a buzz or an inclination to always look at the screen.”

Calcutta film-maker Sandip Ray would agree. He told The Telegraph: “I don’t use a cellphone simply because I don’t need it. I do a lot of my work from home and that’s where I usually am, so people can easily reach me. I have to take so many phone calls at home… having to do the same while on the move would affect my work and make me inattentive.”

Refusenik Indrajit Chanda, 31, who is in business development and sales, had his own reasons: “Cellular towers can cause a lot of harm to the environment. It also occupies too much space in my pocket.”

The refuseniks probably make up less than 5 per cent of those who do not have cellphones, said John Horrigan, consumer research director at America’s National Broadband Task Force.

According to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist cellphones completely. Sometimes, medical imperatives such as an advice for bed rest have forced people who have shunned the cellphone to get one.

Ananda Lal, professor of English at Jadavpur University, has gone for a compromise. “I do have a cellphone but rarely use it,” he said. “I like to maintain my privacy… but there could be emergencies. But I wouldn’t give out my cellphone number to anyone apart from my family.”

The painstaking plans that people without cellphones must make to navigate the world show just how dependent the rest of us have become on our phones. And even the best-laid plans falter.

Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary”.

While at college in Vermont, Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father on his birthday. Halfway there, her car’s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest petrol station and called her parents from a payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home.

After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station for an hour waiting. “It’s situations like this when I would really love to have a phone,” she said. “It’s really getting impossible not to have one.”