Life of a clumsy person is bad enough. You are busy and have no aptitude for technology is worse. If your husband gifts you all expensive gadgets on birthdays and anniversaries is an extra problem mounted. And your son who is crazy about gadgets fidgets with them so much that the basic settings on which you operate these gadgets become completely inaccessible in the most desperate and embarrassing situations, say in front of the patients ?! OK... now there is no way I can handle this anymore. My condition is like 'markatasya surapanam' the Subhashitam that explains the condition of a monkey. You get a monkey drunk and it gets bitten by a scorpion and then a demon possesses him and imagine the antics of the monkey. My family has failed to realize this.

Computer is not exactly my best friend and my son comes to me everyday and displays his newly acquired skills on computer, some graphics, or something like how to make your own search engine, and explains word by word how he did it. He is all excited to tell me all the wonders the binary system has to offer to him and human race in general, and I fail to understand major part of the conversation and just decide to give a bright encouraging smile to my baby who has grown so much that I can't understand his language!

I can never escape from this onslaught of technology and wherever I go I encounter situations where I find myself blankly staring at the person who is releasing technical jargon at the rate of at least twenty per minute which I feel I have heard somewhere and never tried to figure out the exact meaning. I can't act like a fool all the time. I choose to act like an intelligent person and nod my head in a serious manner, and say a happy thanks to the person and run. I run to take a deep breath and to call my husband to tell him the words that I heard, at least a few of them that I can remember, tell him the context and ask him to takeover the matter till it is totally sorted out and handed to me in a platter in the most simple format.

The worst part of the technology is touch screen. Period. Don't even argue with me on this point. I don't know why anyone thought that touchscreen is an advantage. It has set me so backwards that forget about gadgets, I try to open my refrigerator and almirahs by touching them and feel so foolish. I am unable differentiate between the touch screen and non touch-screen machines. Believe me ,it is not a good feeling to find yourself trying to open your table drawer by hovering your hands over the handle. These touchscreen gadgets are very temperamental and moody too. Sometimes you bang your hand on the screen and nothing happens, and on other times you just hold your fingers near the screen trying to figure out which option to choose and voila! the option you were not going choose is already selected and now you are reading an ad for mutual funds.

Always, he learns who is willing to take a chance. Computers are all about trial and error. Everything is in front of you and it is just your ability to decide to click on certain option that defines your aptitude. Playing safe all your life doesn't help here. And being 'she' and not 'he' doesn't help either. We the women who have painstakingly learnt the habit of anticipating problems well in advance while taking care of kids are unable to unlearn. At least I am conditioned to be so. The question of whether to make idli or dosa for tomorrow's breakfast looming large over head makes my brain run away from new problems that may arise just at the click of the mouse.

With technological advancement running like Bolt, and me, bolting away from it, ten years down the line God knows mera kya hoga !!!