Technological Breakthrough

A six-year old girl tells her grandfather to turn on his desktop and when the kid’s told that there’s no Internet, she promptly loses interest. Is this it? Have we ceased to remember the other real worlds that we used to exist in besides the virtual universe that has engulfed our existence?

Before the Internet crept into my life I used to switch on the monstrosity of a desktop that embellished my room before anything else in the morning. A few months later when a dial-up modem made its connection with me I couldn’t get myself to switch on the ‘computer’ if the Internet wasn’t there. So, in a sense I understood the little girl’s predicament or rather than absence of it.

Yes, we’re all are slaves to machines; no one ever doubted that. What’s worse is the smaller the appliance, the greater we fall. Ever since I can recall I have been a tech freak and so when gadgets stop working around me a sense of abandonment swallows me up. In less than a week my cell-phone and my laptop both started misbehaving for no real reason. Like a seasoned rally-racer who strives to oil the machine I put a reminder to update the operating software on my mobile phone; I systematically update the trusted Windows XP and yet these machines have started acting funny.

For sometime now I have been following the Android mania and when I finally switched sides abandoning Symbian wasn’t all that tough. But off late my phone been doing something which is known as spazzing; the screen keeps flashing and apps open on the own and when needed the touch screen doesn’t respond. There was nothing wrong with the instrument and yet it decided to do what one in a million Motorola Milestone does! I upgraded/ restored factory settings and yet the phone doesn’t give up the revolution. And every time it does what its doing I can’t help but think of the old Symbian/ Nokia OS. Would it behave like this? Would it choose not to listen to me? But then I ask myself bigger questions- would I still be happy with 625 MHz of processing speed?

In true Indian sensibilities I have attributed my phone unruly behavior to the fact that I praised it a little too much to friends and family. When all the logic in the world fails everything can be explained to nazar lagna. Maybe its time that someone developed an app, an e-nazabattu, which would simply set things right with the click of a button. Or even a slider action would do, after all I have a touch phone now!