Moms,Dads and Technology

Trring trring…That’s ur Telephone bell,Mr.Graham Bell!
Thanks to Graham Bell,for the first telephone even though he considered it a bane rather than a boon.I beg to differ,Mr.Bell,cos had it not been for your invention, the number of love marriages in the past 3 decades would have been considerably less than what they are , my mom would not have been able to speak to her sisters as much as she does and a lot of us wud have been swished down the drain of the education sytem,(Read,how do u think we figured out what portion of the syllabus came for exams and that too on the eve of the exam?By listening in class? U got to be kidding), But as life gets more complex we can no longer point to one person and say Thanks to him for any of our modern day inventions.Take the internet or the mobile phone which most people swear by as their lifelines.There is no one person whom you can point to and say , yeah, there goes the guy who invented the first cell phone.I know half of you will google in a minute to prove me wrong and if you can, then well, hats off to you for reading through all that material on the net and figuring it out.I can think up a few more things for you to google if you like.

A couple of weeks back I was chatting to my aunt.My uncle is a marine engineer and was away from home.My aunt wud log onto gmail daily check any mails from her hubby.One day she told me that the email was one of the greatest blessings ever and saved so much money on postage.I replied saying that next to Graham bell and the guy who invented cell fones, the person who invented the internet wud get the Swarga-lok noble prize.My aunt replied saying they wud definitely get the vote and especially from Shippie’s wives(Shippie is slang for sailors)She said now thanks to emails she was in touch with her hubby almost every day whereas in earlier days , letters from my uncle would come nearly a month after he mailed them .She said that my Uncle used to spray the letters with his perfume.Once she caught the postman sniffing at a letter and he commented “No perfume on this one” .The letter turned out to be from one of our overseas relatives.I cheekily asked my aunt if she sniffed at the letters too.And she replied saying without doubt and that my cousins did it too cos it brought their father home every time a letter came.While emails were definitely the best, she wistfully said that they lacked the human touch that letters provided.I agree with that completely.I still have every letter my cousins wrote me when we were kids.In those days letters were for grownups and when I got a letter,it was like receiving a secret parcel.For some reason, even today when I receive a letter in mail ,no matter how mundane it is, I love seeing my name printed on it and love tearing it open.(Well, unless it is the electricity bill )

To me the Gtalk is one of the best things invented ever;a real heaven send and I use it every day to chat with my mom,my aunt and a few cousins if they happen to come online.My mom and her trip to becoming technology savvy has been awesome.My dad had been using the cell phone for some 7-8 years or more and all my mom knew then about using it was to hold the fone to her ear and jabber away. Whenever she needed to make a call, Dad would dial the number for her ,press talk “green button” and hand the phone to her.She wud finish her call and then hand it back frantically saying “Done, done!” so that Dad wud press the “red button” to end the call.So my dad was considered the tech-savvy member of the family.Fast forward a few years to when I was in college and stayed at a hostel.Not only did the smart lady learn how to make calls , she also picked up how to send SMS since this was cheaper than making STD calls to her daughter.And she learnt how to turn the dictionary mode on and off and was so good at the abbreviations that sometimes I had to read her messages several times to figure them out.Sometimes they did get a bit too cryptic but then once I figured them out I cud not think of a better way of putting them.Some of my all time favorite messages went time this. “Me sniz sniz.so took med & zzzzz.”Translated into plain English this meant she had another bout of allergy and had been sneezing.So she took her medicine and slept.Simple ,huh?
Anyway,after some time my dad found to his surprise that my mom knew the latest news about me including what I had for dinner without even making a call.All she seemed to do was tap away at the mobile fone and keep giggling.Thats when I started getting messages from my dad.Alas,the messages went something like this “higoodmorningtoyouhopeyouhavenaniceday”.Put a space in the proper places and u have the message “ Hi good morning to you.Hope u have a nice day”.Now when I sent back a reply asking him to put a space between his words so that I cud figure out what he was saying, I got another message which went thus ”howtoputspace”.
Needless to say,my mom took every opportunity to crow over him.Then came the day I joined Cognizant and I cud no longer send messages at any given time of the day.And that’s when my mom learnt to send emails and use the internet.I got a few sheets of newsprint and wrote down detailed instructions on using the google search engine and sending e-mails.The lady used google to look up cake recipes and just about everything that came into her head.And I sent all the forwards I found funny or interesting to her mail.She wud log on daily and check her mail and send me interesting info which she picked up during her Googling.
Well, if u know anything abt my family then u wud know that there is this endless cosmic competition which goes on there with an imaginery scoreboard on which points are chalked up.Now as soon as my dad found out that my mom was getting mails from me albeit only forwards, he got her to create a mail-id for himself which she duly did with a lot of long suffering sighs and condescending remarks on his internet skills.Soon enuf came a mail from pops and when I did not oblige by sending him tons of forwards a day,there came a phone call demanding why I did not send him the same number of forwards that I sent my mom.Jeez…. I scrambled to send him everything I sent my mom including post dated forwards…

When BSNL started putting up a tower in our residential area(which was illegal but they were doing it since our colony had telecom officers living quarters ) my mom learnt how to use the digital camera I had bought for my dad( and which had been sleeping in his cupboard for more than 6 months) and took snaps of the ongoing construction. (am sure the workers were probably flattered to find a lady taking pictures of them at work and probably posed for her) The snaps helped win the case the residents had filed against BSNL.The victory was celebrated with gusto and all the colony folks were full of praise for my mom’s detecting skills while my dad proudly kept telling everyone who wud listen ”My daughter bought me that camera!!”.

One thing I have realized from my family is that Moms wud go any length to pull one over Dads.When Cognizant was giving out ipods, I rang up my Mom and told her that we were receiving ipods as annual gifts.She promptly asked “what’s an ipod?” and I gave her an explanation which she seemed to understand real well.The next day I went home and in middle of dinner , told my dad and my brother that Cognizant was giving us ipods as annual gifts.Both my dad and bro immediately asked “what are ipods?” and before I cud reply , the dame of technology crowed “You don’t know what ipods are???!!! Sheesh!!!” and proceeded to give word for word the explanation which I had given her the previous day.My brother was so shocked that he was speechless.and as for me, I sat quietly and reflected on the deviousness of Moms.

I wondered why this competition existed only in my home until recently when I found my poor uncle asking my aunt to find him a number in HIS cell fone.The aunt in question rather smugly proceeded to find the number all the while inflicting scathing comments on how easy it was to find a number a cell fone and how men are just not technology savvy as women are.I honestly felt rather sorry for the uncle who spake thus in his frustration “Shobha, am asking cos I DON’T KNOW how to find it” .Well, if u ask me , the man had admitted that he did not know something and had it been me I wud have let it go at that but not so my aunt who proceeded to rub it in with a withering “Jayan, how many years have you been using a cell fone? And u still cant find a number in it???!!!”

Poor Dads.