Sunday, May 06, 2012

‘Children change your lives…’

I am very much what is popularly called a person from “old school”. I don’t keep up with the technological advances happening all around me. I generally don’t try something new – but stick to what works for me. Its not that I don’t like it but its just that I refuse to get out my boundaries and I always give one reason or the other. But when there is a need, or if I feel the necessity, or if I am just in the mood on a particular day, lo and behold, I am out of the antiques and well within the technological miracles, accepting it completely and fully, as if it is the obvious way of life.

This has been so since many, many years. When there was this wave of having a gmail account, I was of the opinion that its not needed because I already had yahoo and Hotmail. But eventually I did get myself a gmail account. Then I heard about Orkut and social networking. It was quite some time before I became an active member. Then, when I heard about facebook, I was thinking why do I need to be part of another social networking site when I am already part of Orkut. Eventually I did get into FB.

Once on gmail, my yahoo and Hotmail accounts got sunset. Once on FB, my Orkut account is almost unused. Now (?) that Google+ has come up (again I am thinking why - when there is FB) I wonder if I will become more active on G+ and if my logins to FB become rarer eventually.

Same was the case with many other things but eventually I get there. It took quite a bit of coercing for me to finally open a blogger account. Now, I have over 1200 posts. I became familiar with Reader, Latitude, Google Voice, Chrome, Picasa, Google Docs – all of which I now use quite often.

It is not just everything on the web. Applies to gadgets as well. The camera that I bought satisfied the bare minimum necessity. There were newer versions available by the time I got my hands on iPod and GPS (took many, many years to convince myself on the usefulness of GPS). But I am still holding up on the smart phone, iPad, Kindle, LCD TV – the list goes on and on.

Just the other day in office I overheard an elderly gentleman saying how his wife still never used a cell phone. But apparently his 2-year old grandson was teaching granma how to use Kindle.

This alarmed me. Paavani is going to be 2 years very soon. With a parent like me and antiques all around, I wonder if she will lose her technological competitive edge with her peers. So…..

Just goes to show what it means when someone says ‘Children change your lives…’ If not for our sake, at least for their's…

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