click on the mouse

In the late ninteen seventies, equipped with the jazzy management degrees, when a couple of us twenty something joined service, the seniors would be awed into silence by our wunderkind management jargons, unheard of by them. They would feel subdued and make a fizzing sound. But then they would soon console themselves by arguing that, by the time these management whizkids were of their age, they too would be filled with awe when some newest of the new generation wizards showed an extra ordinary proficiency in the use of the very latest techno-speaks and gadgets.  For the Gen-x kids are weaned on MTV, and the high tech video games tend to make them freedom minded, individualistic, and self absorbed, it is they who keep on calling the shots. Without any formal training in the computers, these fellows click on the mouse and move the cursor with such an extraordinary proficiency that I am forced to throw in the towel for assistance. Surfing through the internet, the young netizens do every damn thing that people of our generation hardly think of.  With Bill Gates' microprocessors having become an in-thing in the offices/homes of high profile bureaucrats, business executives, schools and colleges, it happened to catch my fancy nearly a decade back as well to have one such gadget on my table top. I had the visions, perhaps of, it giving me a sense of one-upmanship over many of our relatives and friends who were not in possession of one, and then guests admiring the gizmo for adorning the small library at my home. Despite my wife voting nay and opposing tooth and nail, the buy was made. The kids, particularly my teenaged son was on top of world, on cloud nine. The geek who came to install the computer, taught the titbits, which my kids alone could understand and remember.  In their frenzy to get a hold onto the system, a click on the  'Delete key' or the like would erase everything in the system. As nobody would own the responsibility in effect, I would be forced to make obligatory rounds of the much-sought-after technician to reset the system, and pay him as per his e diktats. My wife, who has never reconciled with the idea of the computer-spend, would complain that the children waste time and fail to pay attention to their studies and household chores. The net effect of all this was that the curfew' would quite often get imposed (sine die). No body would dare touch the system let alone talk about it. Keys of the room were seized and hidden without leaving a trail behind.  The desk top that I would carry on with for 10 long years has since been chucked out as trash.  My son, a computer engineer by profession, is always glued to his laptop without respite. His lap top is his-kind-of-a-thing. No books, no thumbing through of daily newspapers and no viewing of television programs. Once in a blue moon, when he goes out  with his friends, he is generous enough to lend me his gizmo. Ostensibly to work on my recently rekindled passion (of scribbling-on-papers) when I try to make use of it, I soon come to realize that my computer illiterate wife is correct to taunt me for treading into a domain which is not at all my metier.