Equipped with the jazzy management degrees, when a couple of us twenty-something joined service in the late 1970s, the seniors would be awed into silence by our wunderkind management jargons, unheard of by them. They would feel subdued and make a fizzing sound. But then they would soon console themselves by arguing that, by the time these management whizkids were of their age, they too would be filled with awe when some newest of the new generation wizards showed extra ordinary proficiency in the use of the very latest techno-speaks and gadgets. For the Gen-x kids are weaned on MTV, and the high-tech video games tend to make them freedom minded, individualistic, and self absorbed, it is they who keep on calling the shots. Without any formal training in the computers, these fellows click on the mouse and move the cursor with such an extraordinary proficiency that I am forced to throw in the towel for assistance. Surfing through the internet, the young netizens do every damn thing that people of our generation hardly think of.
With Bill Gates' microprocessors having become an in-thing in the offices/homes of high profile bureaucrats, business executives, schools and colleges, it happened to catch my fancy nearly a decade back as well to have one such gadget on my table top. I had the visions, perhaps of, it giving me a sense of one-upmanship over many of our relatives and friends who were not in possession of one, and then the guests admiring the gizmo for adorning the small library at my home. Despite my wife voting nay and opposing tooth and nail, the purchase was made. The kids, particularly my teenaged son was on top of world, on cloud nine. The geek, who came to install the computer, taught the titbits, which my kids alone could understand and remember. In their frenzy to play with the keys, a click on the 'Delete' key or the like would erase everything in the system. As nobody would own the responsibility in effect, I would be forced to make obligatory rounds of the much-sought-after technician to reset the system, and pay him as per his diktats. My wife, who has never reconciled with the idea of the computer-spend, would complain that the children wasted time and failed to pay attention to their studies and household chores. The net effect of all this was that the curfew' would quite often get imposed (sine die). No body would dare touch the system, let alone talk about it. Keys of the room were seized and hidden without leaving a trail behind.
The desk top that I would carry on with for the 10 long years has since been chucked out as junk. Two years back when my teenager son insisted on replacing it with the laptop, I bought one on easy installments. From that day onwards he(a computer engineer by profession) would always be seen glued to his laptop without respite. As his lap top is his-kind-of-a-thing, he has no time to thumb through the books or daily newspapers, let alone the urge to view television programs. Once in a blue moon, when he goes out with his friends, he is generous enough to lend me his gizmo. Ostensibly to work on my recently rekindled passion (of scribbling-on-papers) when I try to play with the keys of the gadget, I soon come to realize that my computer illiterate wife is with her hackles up. She is not happy with me for treading into a domain that is not at all my metier.
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