Newerways

My brain seemed overflowing with data, erasing bits of my memory. I was requiring more storage/backup to sustain.  The technology came to me as a panacea, rescuing me from the predicament. I emptied the 1400cc container in my head. I noted every event, reminder, celebration, payment, and renewal. Voila. Nothing misses ever again.  I decided to pause all birthday and anniversary reminders from me. I informed my family of the ensuing changes in trends.  My son decided to follow me and made a quick move. He outsmarted me in making his calendar and shared mine with his Google account.  All was going well till my son surprised us with a call to my clinic. He wished me in an excited tone on my anniversary and asked for his father. I laughed and reminded him that the calendar he had shared was to remind me of my ‘mummy–papa’s anniversary’ and not his mummy-papa’s.  We both laughed till he decided to check on his grandpa and grandma. I still wonder at times if he has up...

 

  I Wondered if I should embrace technology more, even if it meant joining Facebook, WhatsApp, and all other social platforms which I did. That is when I decided to explore this new world. Soon, a realization dawned upon me that technology was not passive consumption alone but contribution too. We all draw our inspiration from real stories and connect to them. One such inspirational story is that of Neeraj Chopra, an Olympic medallist in javelin who learned his lessons well from YouTube. He used technology to learn and grow. I had my moment when I started to pen my thoughts in Blogger by learning from YouTube. One of my blog posts saw a comment that made me fall off my chair. It was from someone I did not know but who happened to be in the same school as me. My anonymous reader was amazed as she reconnected with the incident that I had quoted. She further wanted to know about our teacher. It was a blast from the past, one step forward for me.

WITH LOVE We had a new member in the family, our brown-eyed bundle of joy. We followed all her activities, the yawn, the stretching, and the turns. My daughter-in-law and son held her in their arms as they moved from room to room and corner to corner. Soon, it was Father’s Day, and the fathers in the family had their share of greetings. The most lovingly sent was for the ‘Cat Dad.’ My son, with an emoticon of cat. “Hey Misty, are you listening? So proud of you.” came from my son.

It all started with cases. I was on the lookout for cases. The cases of lawyers and doctors. The round ones, square ones, or the oblong ones, and the others that lay obscured. Eventually, I found them. They could never have escaped notice from an observant eye. Mine, I doubted, especially with the near vision defect so usual at my age. Nevertheless, I had come a long way. Searching the internet was becoming my forte. If researchers were to configure reports, they could amass volumes of vital information. I harped on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ and my list became a Schindler’s List. Meaningfully, I braced and donned the detective hat for the quest for cases. What I discovered knocked me down. These were always there -the cases. I Googled, only to know what I had overlooked in my desperation for something worthwhile. I read it all over again. My cases nestled with “Noun is a name of a person, place, or thing.” Do I need to know more about cases? Why not? I giggled my way to th...

Why? Do you do that early in the morning, leaving me at the mercy of the notorious invaders? I said, slapping the mosquitoes that charged through the open doors and windows. I want you to see the early morning skies and natural light and feel the fresh air. It is so beautiful outside in the garden. Many good things are for free. Enjoy them as they are, quipped my mom. Yes, I nodded in agreement. Everything is so expensive these days. This tectonic shift in inflation made me yearn for all I could get for peanuts, if not free. I remembered reading an article written by my mother's maternal uncle published in an old magazine, Saptahik Hindustan wherein he had compared the expenses incurred at his mother's wedding (which had been documented by his grandfather in his account books) to the present times. That was not a solitary incident. A  father narrated how his father-in-law gave him money to arrange his wedding when they migrated to India just before the partition. He carried a t...

ChatGPT revolutionizes the digital world with its immense potential. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, released ChatGPT as a sign of assurance regarding the unpredictable nature of the disruption just launched. The inevitable happened. Our morning dailies continued exaggerating their influence on modern societies, education, and businesses. Students began to use it to write their resumes and SOPs (statement of purpose), and the writer's group continued to emphasize their loss of passive income thanks to this generative malware (as few would call it). There is another group that has an uncanny ability to sniff out the latest trends. Their mantra was simple: FOMO, fear of missing out. This fear had fuelled their desire to succeed. They trotted along with the trendsetters. These visionaries embraced the latest trends. Thriving on their instincts and reveling in what others were hesitant to accept. Going into the depths of the internet world, I came across this signboard fostering a culture o...

  Nature provides us with tremendous opportunities to experience the wonders it has in store for us. So here I was observing the emerging butterfly from a cocoon sticking to the underside of the leaf in hiding. This emergence of a beautiful organism was a stunning sight. I got to see it just once in my garden. I had no camera to record the process. The excitement made me shout out to my grandparents to be a witness to this natural phenomenon, alas! Their arrival was late. When they reached, there were more concerns about my welfare than the ongoing evolutionary process. Living in those challenging times was causing stress and trauma. It was a time of upheaval and unprecedented struggle. There was no room to avoid the trauma. The only way to escape was with resilience. Coping with those life-changing events and turbulent times, I began a journey to express myself creatively. My creative talent oscillated between the two extremes. A papier Mache wall that I made for my living room ow...

  It is not the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that survive, but the one most adaptable to change. Charles Darwin. Technology is transforming us into a data set. What do we eat, what do we do, what do we see, what do we like, how do we entertain, what do we search for? Moore's Law emphasizes that the pace of technological change will continue to grow. Disruptive technologies are on the rise, disrupting our very existence.  Lately, there has been a lot of talk about ChatGPT; inquisitively, I wanted to try it. My tech-driven sons helped me and disrupted the otherwise creative process I relied on so much. It was inspiring to know that GPT could suggest recipes based on the ingredients you have, or even suggest travel destinations within your budget. Interestingly enough. The origin of these innovative ideas prompted me to think of a new, evolving species —a digital species, much like Avatar.  A digital species is a great idea to write about. I outlined my p...

Monetary transfers while traveling were fascinating. Hiding the currency notes in a deep pocket, such as the one stitched on the inner side of the vest, was all too common. My grandfather traveled this way with the money hidden from the pickpockets' maneuvers. He could even feel it with his bare hand on his torso if the need arose. My father, a generation younger, preferred to keep his money safely hidden in his socks while traveling. Unwilling to reveal his hideout, he continued to wear his shoes, unmindful of the discomfort they caused. As for me, I ridiculed the idea of such safe places, but I carried mine in the deep pockets of my jacket or neatly rolled into the drawstring pocket of my salwar. Generation Z did not believe in the cheat sheets that we hoisted. They went a step further and carried their bank in their pockets. Their cheat sheets consisted of PINs and passwords as they swiped or transferred. My Paytm account was messed up by cheats when my husband responded to a co...

A dhoti-clad man stood next to the reception counter where I stood to attend to my daily records. A brief look at his face made me question the nature of his work in the hospital. He opened up his file and handed me his papers. He had undergone surgery for sarcoma maxillary sinus, a carcinoma in the hollow bone adjacent to the nose, twenty years ago. He held a dentist responsible for the negligence caused in extracting his tooth. It resulted in this lifelong illness. My attempts to shake the belief he had held for twenty years seemed an impossible feat. So, I aimed to alleviate his current problem and provide him some relief. The man continued further; he pulled up his dhoti to his thigh. What I saw was no less scary and unsightly. It imitated the brown extensions of the roots of trees above the ground. The lengths and heights varied. Truncated lines existed on those roots and merged well with the background. Nature has its way of designing things up. The thigh from where doctors had r...