Tech Tyranny

(Published in First City magazine, October 2012)

“Uff, it’s not a ‘mobile’, just call it a cell!” And thus I was tech-corrected by my youngest cousin, recently, with great eye-wringing, tch-tch-ing disdain. Totally below the belt stuff, this, mostly because she said it in exactly the tone I love using to correct everybody’s grammar and pronunciation with full-full ‘English-Honours-Type’ snobbery. “It’s called mobile in Punjabi, silly,” I said, hiding my stung lingo-obsessed self, and unleashing a wild rolling-eyes teenager look on her.

Lucky exit, that one. But it’s not like I haven’t revisited the memory and slapped my forehead, thinking, who am I fooling anyway? When it comes to technology, I’m always the ganwaar, the village buffoon. Nah, scratch that. Let’s just say I’m that one big Bermuda Triangle zone where all sophisticated gadgetry comes to die, go ka-boom, never be seen again. The day I was born, it rained and the electricity snapped off. By some freak cosmic joke, electrical circuits and I don’t get along ever since. I enter the room; phones lose their mojo. They jump out of my hand and thrash themselves on the floor; they drink up a gallon of water and then go hang themselves. Ipods discharge, lose themselves. Laptops bleat to manic battery-low deaths; many of them have been found to snap and crackle letters off their keyboards in mysterious terror.  

Very few have survived to tell this tale; such as this brave dinosaur-aged, hippo-sized, haldi-stained laptop of mine I type these words on. Multiple organ failure is around the corner for said gadget, but it surely is my extra limb on days when I want to procrastinate the To Do and vegetate in front of Facebook all day. On all other days, as my husband correctly analysed, I use it as Typewriter with Internet. (In winters, it doubles as a perfect lap hot-water bottle too). Torrent is like the Loch Ness Monster it’s heard of but never seen; Firefox merely an excess; VLC player an accessory added under great peer pressure. Surely the day my laptop meets an Apple, it’ll think it’s died and gone to heaven. 

And so in the city of sho-shaa, my Dilli, where tech gadgets are top-notch Conversation Generators, I often get tongue-tied. At times I pretend to know more than I do, and consequently have to surgically extract foot from mouth after making the artiest tech faux pas. There is a large part of my memory that’s still pre-Google (and Google-proof). Words like memory, ram, touch, cloud are still about swirling remnants, Aries’ sign, intuitive talking, and fluffy sugar candy in my disgustingly romanticising brain; nothing to do with hardware basics or software advances yet. I am touchscreen-phobic because I grew up in the 1990s, when all buttons on computers needed a minute-long Gspot-style cajoling to get properly turned on. I still maintain the opinion that URL just sounds like ‘urinal’ said really fast. I like to think that I belong to a genetically extinct race that once was; I have a theatrically perverse notion that I am the last one standing.

You can only imagine what hell I go through each day, manoeuvring my way through a technology-infested life. On better days, it’s all over with a ‘she doesn’t know the meaning of life’ look from an iPad devotee. On the mildly irritating days I spend precious creative time hunting for miniature keys to the secret lockable diary in which absent-minded me writes all her passwords. On other days I survive a brutal murder of my precious reading high, as incessant washing machine alarms and microwave-reminder bleats time their wails with the advent of the third-last page of my fabulously climaxing book.

But the worst days are those when I’m in the mood to say ‘why?’ to every idiosyncrasy of technology. These are the days when I am outwardly lily-calm and inwardly boiling with teeth-grinding rage and well-bottled frustration against this invisible virtual world that everybody else is pretty happy to live with. These are the days when all I do is count instances of injustice, such as the ones my laptop perpetrates on me:

The condescension, when a program I took five lightyears and an instruction manual to learn, gets auto-upgraded with a mere injunction, ‘Learn More’.

The silly snobbery with which it refuses to ‘Help’ me, because I typed a grammatically-complete question that mirrors the complexity of the situation I find self in, after said upgrade.

The lack of freewill in the tech world that gives me only the polite option of ‘OK’ when it’s offering nasty solutions to my problems (‘all data will be erased’).

The crawl-under-my-skin aunty-tone in which it asks every time I seek Delete-style closure on certain things, ‘Are you sure?’

The insouciance with which it says, ‘You cannot perform this action.’ The indifferent silence with which it treats my loud repartee, “Hell, I can. Off with your head!”

The ransom message it offers ever so often, especially when I’m in a tearing hurry to use a program: ‘An update for version zillion.zillion.zillion is available. Do you want to download?’

The absolute lack of expressive grammatical emphasis (italics, Caps Lock) it allows me when I respond to above question with a wild said-aloud ‘NAWW!!’.

The way it expects me to be totally fine with the sillyness of going to Start when all I wanna do is Shut Down.

Venting aside, one ironic fact still remains: None of these compare to the sinking feeling that weighs my diaphragm down after I’ve rebelled with a jugaad other than the bifurcated option my computer gave me, and everything on the screen is pretty ‘well-hung’ for the fourth time in a row. That’s the dreadful moment when I start rifling through all the precious things I will lose if hard disk crashes. It’s a bit like that filmi moment of watching your life pass by just before you die (I imagine that moment is always awfully long for a writer who doesn’t write longhand). At the end of that tunnel, a suitably-chastened me always emerges silently, reaches out obediently, and timidly clicks, ‘OK’.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

On most days only a deep gash across my To Do list tasks gives me cathartic pleasure. On other rare technology-friendly days when I need to type everything to make sense of it, I To-Do on Workflowy.

They call it a way to ‘organise your brain’, which is just clever tech-jargon for App That Imitates Your Brain Well. Looks really non-intimidating (pretty much like a blank Word Doc), and makes great tree-like lists with many, many sub-lists. So you can make a gigantic lists that incorporate work and home stuff, and they’ll still look neat; just zoom on a sub-list and it becomes a new list-page (no indecipherable scrawls where the page-space ran out). Add tags to mark stuff to do ‘today’ and ‘soon’, so that you can To Do for the future even as you tackle today’s list. Drag tasks around to prioritise. Export as a file, or print for satisfaction. The best part: A simple Ctrl + Enter after completing a task will nicely scratch the task out, just like from the pencil and paper days! 

At www.workflowy.com.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).