Raghu Sir was filled with a mix of awe and anxiety when his son, Shyam, gifted him a brand new laptop on his seventieth birthday. ‘Why spend so much money and buy such expensive things for me, Son?’ he asked the young man, who lived with his family in Hyderabad. ‘It’s nothing, appa,’ the ever-confident son assured him with a wide smile. ‘You will find it very useful.’ Raghu Sir, though, had his own doubts. What would a Chennai-based retired banker like him who was happy attending Carnatic kutcheris and religious discourses do with a laptop? Anyway, with painstaking effort, and with the help of his grandson, he had already learnt how to open and operate YouTube and WhatsApp on his mobile phone. What more did he want in life? He was more than thankful and content with these two God-sent apps; that like a good old man, he had learnt to be happy with what he had and not crave for more and more from this mind-boggling (God or devil, he wondered) technology! With the arrival of the laptop though, he was now in a fix. What actually was he going to do with it? But Raghu Sir was wise enough to not air his doubts to his son and thought it better to accept the costly present with all the grace that a seventy-year-old man could summon.
In the initial days, Shyam instructed him over the phone on how to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint, calmly elucidating the salient features and uses of these applications. ‘You could do your monthly budgeting on Excel. You can type your journal entries in Word. You can put together your poems in a PowerPoint Presentation,’ Shyam went on, clearly impressed with his decision to gift his father a laptop. But Raghu Sir couldn’t for the life of him comprehend how the laptop could give him the intimacy that he felt when he physically moved his fountain pen over the pages of his diaries that he maintained for recording expenses and his daily thoughts. Yet, Raghu Sir tried his best to be the alert listener, trying to grasp the hi-tech concepts that Shyam was shooting his way. He silently struggled to catch up with all the parlance.
Soon his busy son moved away from the lectures to questions. ‘Did you switch on the laptop today?’ ‘Did you open Google chrome to browse the Internet?’ ‘Did you speak to Usha athai over Skype today?’ – his WhatsApp messages (sounding a bit impatient, thought Raghu Sir) flooded his father’s phone. Sometimes, Raghu Sir would reply in the affirmative, measuring his words carefully, trying to cover all aspects of the truth, which meant that he did try but wasn’t very successful. As the months passed though, as with all things in life, the novelty of the purchase wore out – for his son. Not for Raghu Sir.
Being the man from the 1940s, Raghu Sir was overcome with guilt every time he saw the laptop lying in one corner, without being put to the use it had to for the amount of money invested in it. And for some reason, his technology-phobic mind also meant that he shuddered every time he gathered the guts to open the device and begin operating. He resisted it in a way that surprised even him. ‘Why am I not able to overcome this strange fear? Why do I feel intimidated by a mere device?’ he often reflected philosophically but to no avail. One day, though, he firmed himself up and decided to use it. ‘Sudha, bring my laptop from the cupboard,’ he called out to his wife proudly. The ever-obedient wife of his brought the device with a lot of dedication and care and deposited it in her husband’s hands.
Raghu Sir had learnt how to switch the laptop on and so, he confidently pressed the power button located at the top-left corner. But to his horror, the device didn’t turn on. The old man frantically pressed the button ten times but realised that nothing was happening. Panic-stricken, he gazed at the clock. It was four in the evening. There was no way he could call his son to find out what the problem could be and fix it. He would be busy at work and he couldn’t disturb him. To his relief, he realized that his daughter-in-law would be home, back from work, picking up the kids on the way. He dialled her number.
‘Shruthi, I hope I am not disturbing you,’ he asked her in a kind voice. ‘Not at all,’ she replied, ‘tell me, is something wrong?’ Raghu Sir was relieved and surprised at his daughter-in-law’s intuitive sense. ‘Yes, the laptop…’ he paused, ‘…it’s not switching on. I pressed the power button like you had told, but it is not coming on,’ he went on breathlessly. Shruthi thought for a bit and said, ‘I think it is out of charge,’ she said, ‘Don’t worry, just connect the cable to power and the other end to the laptop charging point, it should boot.’ Raghu Sir felt like he was caught in a whirlpool of jargon. ‘What, can you come again?’ he said with a worried expression on his face. His patient daughter-in-law took another ten minutes to make him grasp what she had said and eventually get him to connect the laptop to power. ‘It’s like how you charge your phone,’ she explained, amused that she was going back in the timeline of technology, explaining the functioning of a laptop, taking its successor, the mobile phone, as an example.
Over time, there were other episodes of horror – like the time when the screen just froze and his daughter-in-law (who by now had become his equivalent of a call-centre assistant to fix laptop worries and issues, with a heart of gold though!) had a tough time explaining to him about hard reset, or another time when he didn’t know how to save a document, or the latest one, when he didn’t know how to type a URL into the web browser (Chrome, he said, with an air of pride!). Slowly though, Raghu Sir trekked up the tough path and began using his laptop with practised ease, always finding a reason to put it to good use – like copying all the stuff he wrote in his expense and personal journals into Excel and Word. He even learnt how to email his friends, still typing an old-fashioned letter in Word and then copy-pasting it into the mail body. Soon, the laptop found a place of pride on his coveted study table and during nights, before he retired to bed, he would check if the pale white glow on the side of the laptop was on. To him, it symbolized that his laptop was alive, and all was well. He would then smile and say to it softly, ‘Getting on better, the two of us, aren’t we?’ before switching off the table lamp and retiring to bed, hoping to wake up to another day with his foe-turned-friend – the laptop.