Ever wondered how our lives were before the invasion of Windows and MS office. My first memory of a computer was back in 1992. Us 3rd graders had 3 sessions of "computer science" in a week. The teacher, a pretty but quite inexperienced "Computer science graduate" (think how ahead of the times she might have been, at that time however, she was desperately seeking employment), recently migrated from India. We were expected to switch on the computer and allowed to play "Digger" for half an hour. The half hour would be spent with three of us grappling for our turn on a dirty white keyboard and getting a monochromatic "digger" to chew up as many bombs as possible before it gets eaten. The next half hour was spent on learning the parts of a computer and theory stuff..class dismissed.
Fast forward today..There is animation, pixels and multi colour displays. We have apps on phones even, social networking, apps for blogs and what not. Mankind has set out the Technology Lion and how..the Lion has engulfed the forest and declared himself King of Everything he surveyed. He has proven that virtually everything in this world has a binary code..0s and 1s are supreme. If you cant think in terms of The Code, then you probably do not exist. A certain Mr Gates woke up and decided to make Windows and the rest is history. The technology revolution was complete and humans were taken as slaves.
Ctrl C + Ctrl V has taken over our lives hasnt it. A calculator is now plain benign. Every person worth his weight has a phone with an app for it and Gates too has helped with Excel. Children of the 90s (of which I count myself a part of) spent several hundred hours mugging formula and perfecting execution of complex mathematical operations. All to no avail. Excel executes brilliantly. No need to perfect your spellings now; nothing beats Spell Check. And what about reading the newspaper every day to increase your GK; hallo, knock, knock..heard of wikipedia???. .Basically technology has more or less negated every thing that we did in our 12 years of school. Learn how to google and you are good to go, it seems to say.
That aside, even though Technology has reduced the best of us to seemingly mundane slaves, we cannot ignore what it has allowed us to do. Freed our time to creatively evolve and ensured that irrespective of what your skill sets may be, you can always earn a living. Ctrl C+ Ctrl V has replaced the pen and paper and the little mouse takes you to any corner of the cyber globe; much like mooshakaa did for the elephant God Ganesha.Our optical Mooshaka clicks and ticks and places the whole cyber world at our feet. Millions of young people every year latch on to Him and hope for their lives to be bettered; careers to be made and aspirations to be fulfilled. Our modern day Mooshaka is like the proverbial Mandrake, a Brahma-asthra of sorts. We turn to him when we need home remedies for illness, hope for the terminally ill, new friends or even a new home. Mooshaka is our key to the outside world..who cares if you dont have to get off your behind anymore?