We bought our first desktop computer when my wife was pregnant. Initially we kept both items of news under wraps, not sure as to what these two would bring for us in the future. Both were essentially immobile, connected to the power source by the umbilical cord and the power cord. But over time the news spread, as the bulk of both increased. The baby’s presence became apparent from the enlarging tummy; the presence of the computer became clear when we had a computer table, a dot-matrix printer and a UPS, or uninterrupted power supply system. We wrapped the computer every night with a soft bed-sheet to protect it from dust and insects, while nature’s amniotic fluid shock-absorbed the daily bump to keep the growing humanoid safe.
After the standard incubation period of nine months the baby emerged. I was expecting the baby to be a bundle of joy, but it turned out to be a cloth- wrapped, highly fragile piece of equipment that let out high-pitched cries without any discernible provocation, with wetness springing out at unacceptable frequencies. The computer dot matrix printer tried its best to compete with the baby’s cry. While the baby’s cry tended to peak at night, the printer added its quota of noise pollution during the daytime. The black-and-white computer screen, frozen in a state of meditation with a ‘win’ and a flashing slash in the top left corner, would coldly blink at me. I was disappointed, not sure as to what to do
with both of my new acquisitions. I had expected far more fun out of both.
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By the following year things changed. The baby started recognising me and smiling. The computer got a new partner, a telephone modem. As the baby acquired language skills, the computer changed to a colourful, icon-based, interactive form, beaming a ‘welcome’ every time I logged in. Suddenly the baby and the computer became ‘my baby’ and ‘my computer’ respectively.
As time passed, I would wait for my hospital work to be over as quickly as possible to come home and play with my daughter, and when she slept I would switch on the computer, getting drawn into then-new world of the Internet. On holidays, my daughter used to climb on top of the table and sit beside the computer in a bid to fight with her electronic competitor, to attract my attention. She always won, after all, her win was ‘spot-fixed’.
Both my daughter and my computer quickly acquired freedom. The desktop changed to a laptop computer and started coming with me to the hospital while the human counterpart boarded the school bus. During early school both required frequent charging, but then things changed. The teething troubles of missing shoelaces and unexpected shutdowns slowly withered away. But still the unexplained stomach pain prior to that annual examination, or that ‘not responding’ logo, popping up minutes before that important presentation, continued to put me in a state of confusion.
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Then began the era of the ‘bag’ craze. At the shop I would sift through the labels for a low-cost but good-looking laptop bag, but before I could make up my mind my daughter would fish out the costliest school bag with a ‘Tom & Jerry’ picture and claim it to be the coolest school bag
of her whole life. A little trace of shower in her eyes, a frown on my wife’s face, and a swipe of a credit card made sure that we left the store with the school bag and a million-dollar smile, leaving the laptop bag idea back at the store, each time. As time passed I had to source an external hard disk for the laptop to accommodate the growing gigabytes of data, while her room needed a new shelf, to stash the increasing load of textbooks and tuition notes. With technology speeding up, booting time decreased for the computer as well as the biological companion. The old PC took five minutes to boot, while the new laptop was up and running in less than a minute. My daughter’s ‘just five more minutes mom’ morning chime vanished and she too would be ready for college in a jiffy.
It took another couple of years to get Wi-Fi replace the cord as my daughter travelled abroad for higher studies. My computer, now rechristened ‘Smartphone’ and powered by android, sits in my pocket with my data and her photo stored in the cloud, both far away in a server in California.
Sometimes I wish I got back both my desktops.