Column

The Spectator

It all started with my iPod. I was on a train between Valencia and Madrid, and noticed that whereas every one around me was occupied with their laptops, or mobiles or discmans or MP3 players there was one lady who had absolutely nothing to do. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that I could have offered her a book to read while I watched a film on my computer. No, I had to go and lend her my iPod, with its 10,000 songs carefully culled from various dec-ades, genres, eras. That’s when my problems began.

The next day I noticed my nifty little gizmo ‘acting strange’. You will notice that I don’t even know the jargon to describe the problem. All I can say is that it became wonky. Very, very wonky. Like a person losing their head. And then it stopped working.

Very soon after that, my mobile ‘stopped working.’ In a different way than my iPod. In this case it resembled a patient who suddenly catches a minor cold — and then rapidly deteriorates until he dies of pneumonia. When the mobile engineer asked me to tell him what had gone wrong that’s what I told him.

Soon after every thing began breaking down fusing or going belly up before my eyes. Problems beget more problems and blew up in my face. The iPod engineer had to delete my data to ‘reformat’ the damn thing. So I borrowed a friend’s hard disk to ‘copy’ his music. The harddisk got damaged, all 50,000 songs or GB or whatever. So I had to buy a new one, locate the original and copy it all on. Meanwhile, the iPod was returned — but all it played was the Rang De Basanti title song which the engineer had put on as a test drive. It refused to take in any new music. So I had to take it to another engineer.

Meanwhile, my TV surround system at home got ‘jammed’. And the remote got ‘stuck’ too. When I took to watching films on my laptop — the DVD player got ‘stuck!’ Also, the AC began ‘sulking’— and dragged its heels refusing to cool the room.

The mobile engineer, meanwhile, called to say that there was a ‘software problem’ and it would take a month to fix it.

To tide me over my son put my SIM card in his spare mobile but it was so fancy that for the first two days I couldn’t figure out how to receive calls. What was worse was that every one thought that since I had my old number I would be as proficient as I had always been. They couldn’t figure out why I was not returning missed calls, replying to smss or recognising their numbers. I got tired explaining the problem to them.

For any one out there as techno-challenged and gadget-miserable as I am at the moment, I would like to say that there used to be a time when the only phone I had was a fat black one that sat on my parent’s desk attached to the wall, the only music system was a gramophone, the only films I watched were in a theatre — and the only way to cool a room was the fan. And I was so very, very happy!

Also I’d like to add that if you want to be nice to some one — share your thoughts with them, or your youth or even your bodily fluids — but never ever share your iPod with them. Ever!

s_malavika@dnaindia.net