Kedar says..

I recently had a lifetime change.. when you talk about lifetime changes, you normally think about getting a job, getting married, having children, buying a house, having an affair, having a divorce.. umm, I think you get the drift I went for a change in my life recently with the same bit of seriousness, as I would for any of the above, and it makes sense that I call it a “Lifetime change” too…

The change was that I dumped M-S Windows (or Miss Windows) and embraced a new stylish girlfriend. Now having spent almost every day of my life, for the last 16 years, in front of different types of computers, I think they too, deserve to claim a piece of my life. So it is appropriate to call this change a lifetime change.

You know, I have ‘dated’ a lot of ‘damsels’ so far.. err, I mean computers.. a weird one called ZX Spectrum back in 1988 that ‘claimed to be a computer’ with a Cassette tape (!), the oldies – PC XTs, the ATs, Honeywell Unix terminals and many other Unix terminals whose names I have forgotten, the IBM mainframe terminals, PC 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums xxx, Dual cores… bla bla bla.

And I have seen the Operating Systems that control their behaviors, mood swings, tantrums – the various flavors of Unix’es, MS DOS, IBM Mainframe OSs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP Pro, XP Home, 2000 flavors of Linux’s (!), Windows -2000, -2003, Mac OS-X, Mac Leopard….

So many of them, but I managed to stay loyal to one family throughout this 16 yr journey – the Microsoft family! I have dated many girls from that family, keeping the family loyalty intact for all these years! I have enjoyed the closeness, their popularity, their riches, and at the same time, have suffered at their hands, defended them out in the world, got embarrassed because of them, but still, at the end of the day, I came back to them – in their palace, to their kingdom, back to my in-laws house in Redmond….

I never looked anywhere else.. because  I was so brainwashed by the Microsoft family members! I didn’t have a voice of my own, nor was I allowed to think outside the “Window”! I was comfortable, because it was all too familiar to me – someone blowing their fuse whenever they want, not having anybody to depend on, always living in fear of losing everything you have.. I thought that’s how it is in a love affair – you know, being ready to sacrifice, being ready to give, being forgiving, undemanding.. And I didn’t realize when those love affairs morphed into hate affairs.. I continued on as if I was married to the whole family and as if there were no divorce courts! It was as if, I had to go from one cousin to another…!

So then this day in February, I was in the bathroom, (nothing unusual about that.. I am in my bathroom every day! – looking in the mirror.. you know, the usual stuff, checking if I still look young.. oh, there is a gray hair here, maybe I can pull that out.. and suddenly that inner voice growled at me – (you know, how your inner voice growls at you in your stomach.. ever experienced that? That’s your inner voice..) – so that voice said – “hey buddy, you are not so old.. so you are old but not sooo old.. don’t give up on life. You will find a soulmate if you are committed to making this change.” And I started looking at my options.. Linux was too complicated and couldn’t have been someone to go steady with. The only other option I had been eying all these days was the stylish Mac, the one I had complained about in the past like a fool. I poured my heart out in front of her and she was magnanimous in accepting me.

That day, I finally embraced a bright, slim MacBook Pro and flew away on my vacation to India. Call it my disloyalty to Microsoft family or my mid-life crisis – but that’s how my love affair with the Mac started after so many stale years of living with the Microsoft family.

I had a few flings with the Mac in the past but it was always too clumsy, since there was no commitment from my side. And I used to always complain as to why it did not ‘click right’ (but well, Mac doesn’t have a “right click” on its mouse anyway … But I guess I never looked at her heart, which is made of pure gold – the Unix heart – one that holds steady..

From that day, I began living my new life, accepting things that were minor inconveniences, adapting to the new way of life, new moods, new responses, all the while admiring the beauty of my new girlfriend. And I told myself, nobody is perfect… err.. that sounded familiar!

..anyway, I still live my life, there is still programming, surfing, storing, retrieving, shutting down, starting up, but it is just done in a different way.

After all, life is a way of living rather than the living itself!

—- END OF PART 1 —-

Days passed by, then months and then a couple of years.. One day, I found myself in the same bathroom, in front of the same mirror.. again! And I was questioning my lifetime change all over again………

Cracks had begun to appear here and there within 2 months of starting this new relationship, and it eventually died last week without even reaching its first anniversary! Last week, standing in front of a mirror, I looked straight in my eyes and asked – is this what you really wanted? That you can’t do things you want to do, that everything takes 5 steps when it used to take one or two, that productivity is suffering at the hands of beauty…?

I thought about it real hard, “can I go back to Ms Windows.. and what kind of a welcome will I get?”, “will it be life as usual again or have things changed irreversibly?” I had to try though.. so I knocked on the door of the “Redmond mansion” again..

..there she was.. same attire, same attitude, just the way I had left her. She welcomed me with a “crash”, as if to tell me that she hasn’t changed just because I dumped her once. I expected this, and remained nonchalant.. unperturbed. I just wanted in, and accept my fate with all its fallacies. I had learned my lessons – that all the beauty in the world is in the bias of the infactuated! That nothing is stable or reliable, that beauty does not necessarily mean practicality, that hype seldom matches reality, that awe should sometimes just stay that way and not try to be part of your day-to-day life, and that everything that gets trashed by elites is not always useless.

So I am back.. some people tease me about my choice, some say I didn’t have the guts to handle a glamorous girlfriend… all I can say is at the end of the day, I tried, I dated the hot and happening Mac for a year, but things did not really work out between us. People may laugh at Ms Windows, think it’s stupid and unreliable, but I did go over the fence and played the field… and tell you what, they are all the same!!

Don’t get lured by one or the other, stick with the one you like and live your life!

Mid-life crisis is a term that some of you might already understand.. and for those who don’t, I am an example in front of you. You know, ever since I was born, I was destined to get old. So, mid-life itself wasn’t a surprise. But I didn’t know there will be crisis written all over it!

For a long time, I happily lived in my 20s.. Even when I crossed over into the 30s, I was still doing okay, thinking I am still in my 20s.. Until I moved into the later half of the 30s, and now things really appeared to be moving in a direction that I did not want to go! This is like that feeling of standing on a beach.. Pretty soon the ocean starts pulling you in, along with the sand under your feet! Now with all your might, you are trying to hold your ground. It’s the same feeling..

Scientifically speaking, I don’t really think there is such a thing, disease, or medical condition as Mid-Life Crisis.. But there are some symptoms that you are bound to notice..

It hit me one day when someone took a picture of me in full daylight with my head tilted forward.. don’t remember who it was, otherwise I would’ve strangled him!! And there it was.. a barren spot on my head happily reflecting the sunlight! It was a cruel revelation! I hurried home and stared at myself in the mirror and to my horror, there was another shock.. not all hair on my head had the same color anymore! Some of them had started acquiring the much dreaded gray! From then on, it became a ritual for me – a ritual of uprooting these gray infidels who were happily disclosing my age without my permission!

I started thinking differently.. I thought cutting my hair short, made me look younger. On one hand, I was losing hair by the dozens, I was trying to hold onto every single one in the shower, pleading, begging in front of every falling hair, to not let go of me.. and on the other hand, I was pulling some out because they were ‘misfits’! Hardly helped the situation really..! But you gotta do what you gotta do..!

Then there were the TV commercials for hair restoration.. this is your head before, and this is your head after – after applying this hair growing cream, that is! For them, if it did not work, it was just a matter of refunding the money… but for me, it was a heartbreak! I simply did not have the time for trial and ERROR!

I started visiting all the stores that most of the teenage crowd buys clothes from – American Eagle, Hollister, Abercombie, Forever 21.. hoping to find something there that will rekindle that sense of being young! Whenever I bought something from there, I felt happy..! When I was roaming through the stores looking at all the young crowd, I started thinking about all the stories of young girls falling in love with married old men, and actually started believing them!! It was like my secret wish! Because I was realizing now that none of the girls were looking AT me anymore! They had started looking THROUGH me as if looking in thin air…! At home, my wife was now less suspicious of me! I don’t know if I should feel happy about it – because it wasn’t because I was getting more loyal or she was getting more lenient towards me.. But because she did not think of me as a risk anymore, that anybody would be willing to take anyway!!

I didn’t want to give up.. so I decided to fight back.. I started going to the gym, trying to stay in shape.. started playing Tennis. All the young kids who were waiting outside the tennis court, for me to get out of there, were probably thinking  – “What in the world is this uncle doing here.. why doesn’t he go buy some groceries, instead of occupying this court..?!”.. I just ignored them..

But in all this, I still couldn’t avoid one thing.. my birthdays! They kept coming year after year.. once they were celebrations, now they were a menace.. I really wish my birthday was on 29th February. If you do the calculations, I would still be in school by now! Being the only married kid! But it was not so. So I started lying, stealing a year here and there when asked about my age, or simply tried to avoid the question or just became ambiguous about it. I even removed the year from my Facebook profile..!

And I continued to fight… fight, with all my liar’s might, to stay below 40… because the crisis, had really and finally crept into my mid-life…!

When I stepped out of my bachelorhood, I certainly knew there was something called Grocery shopping.. ‘coz you need milk, you need vegetables, you need soap, toilet tissues.. the list goes on. But before marriage, I was sort of noncommittal towards it. My mom would ask me to get something and I would get it. Marriage on the other hand, brought this commitment much closer to my heart and wallet! Just when I think I can laze around on a rainy Sunday – lying on the sofa,  sipping tea, eating junk food, and such..  my wife tells me to go get some Milk. Now why does milk have this uncanny ability to get over suddenly?! In my childhood, a milkman used to deliver milk at our door. How convenient, isn’t it? But even he used to miss a day or two, and I used to have to get up right in the middle of my early morning sleep to get milk from the store.

Anyways, I remember in my childhood, we did not have supermarkets. There were small grocery shops. One would go there with a list of things written on a piece of paper, and the shopkeeper would go in and get those things for you. You paid him the money and got out of there. At the most, you would buy a candy in addition to that because it was kept at the counter.

Come supermarkets and you started seeing everything stacked up in front of you and you actually started walking through the store. This is a big setup! You started thinking you needed to buy each and everything in the store, even if you just went in there to buy a toothbrush! So as you are going through the aisles, you are thinking – “yeah, I think I do want my commode to smell like a melon, so let me get that liquid that makes it smell like that!”. You go through the freezer section, the bread section, snacks, cookies, coffee, fresh produce, toiletries.. different types of tissues.. you know, toilet tissues, car tissues, scented tissues, bathroom tissues, kids tissues.. one ply, two ply tissues.. with pictures of a bear and his rear! You are standing there and thinking – just what kind of tissue should be entrusted to do the job for me!? You just can’t make up your mind..

Choices.. and too many of them.. they make your life hell!

Supermarkets are truly amazing though.. before they came on the scene, I didn’t know Milk had so much variety! Fat free, 1%, 2%, 3%, vitamin D, organic, soya, half and half.. I never got this name by the way – what is half and half? Half of what? And then you add half of something else and it becomes 1 of some new thing? Anyways, all this variety is out there to confuse you, to trick you into buying something that you don’t really want. Just see the checkout counter.. it has things like lip balms, chocolates, face tissues, batteries, all the way to cameras! It’s as if you come to the checkout counter and go – “oh, I almost forgot, I did want to buy a camera to take pictures of my grocery today!“.. I mean, what is the thought process behind having things like that there..? I once saw a torchlight with nail clippers hanging by the side! Sure, while you are trying to find your way through the dark, why don’t you cut your nails too?!

So you are at the checkout counter, and you purposely did not get more than 10 items, so that you can qualify for that “10 items or less” fast counter.. You might have 5 veggies, bringing the total to 14, but you count them as 1 since it is all vegetables anyway! This is still, in my opinion, an acceptable level of cheating.. But invariably there will be someone who is trying to sneak in with 30 items in this lane.. Now is it so horribly difficult to see that you clearly have way more than 10 items in your cart? This person will completely ignore your angry glances at his/her cart, and manage to say something like “oh, I didn’t realize this was 10 items or less” to the checkout lady and move on!

While you are waiting there patiently, there are these middle-to-old age ladies who refuse to like the technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries! They will either pull out a stack of coupons, a checkbook or a wad of $1 bills from their oversized purses when paying for their grocery! I always wonder if  these people are just trying to make a statement? Something like – “I am old and I have loads of money.. and I don’t need no stinkin’ card to buy things!?“.. You know what? – we get it, alright?!

Finally you face the person at the counter and throw the usual “How are you?” at him/her. Now this, “How are you” must be one of the most abused questions of modern times! There isn’t another question quite like this one, that gets asked without a real desire for an answer! But it’s okay.. I guess it was born out of a desire to greet someone with more than just a single word like “Hi”..

“Did you find everything okay“? – that’s another one of such questions. Have you ever answered that question with a “No”?! You can’t, because “No” is not a valid option for this question! It’s just like you go to a restaurant, they bring your food and then ask you after some time – “How is everything today?” – you say “It’s great” even if you didn’t like the food!!! So you can’t say “No” to questions like these – have you tried saying – No, I think you guys are cheating, you keep the milk cans that are expiring tomorrow in the front so that people will pick them up instead of the ones that are expiring a week later! Or No, I wanted to ride in those battery powered wheelchairs for the disabled, but your store assistant did not let me!.. Ever tried that? Have you seen those battery powered wheelchairs? Ever wanted to ride in those? I have, not as a handicapped person.. but as a normal healthy person whose feet hurt while his wife is looking at each and every item in the store!!

An alternative way is to go for the new Self checkouts.. They are a great invention, don’t get me wrong.. But you know, I have real privacy issues with those! So the machine keeps announcing what I have purchased – “Weigh your bananas, weigh your red delicious apples, or Enter your donuts..”. Now why is that? Whatever happened to plain old fashioned privacy?! And then you keep something on the side and the machine keeps telling you to “place the item in the bag“, so you keep it in the bag, and then it says “take it out of the bag..“, so you take it out again.. and finally it says “wait for the attendant!“. Now you are trying hard to appear tech-savvy, but now everyone behind you, thinks you are an idiot who can’t even operate this simple machine!

Somehow you pay your way out of all this madness and come out with at least 5 bags of stuff when you should’ve just been carrying a toothbrush! But you just came out of a supermarket! You can’t help it! The whole thing is designed to make a fool out of you! So you gladly oblige and pay for it too…!

I am going to tell you 2 stories today, and I hope to make my point in the process. The first story is of the days when I could openly disclose my age to anybody – when I was in my teens I mean..! It was a fine summer night, when I faced the truth for the very first time.. There on the wall, was the test to my bravery, a test to my being a man.. My father was out of town and I was the only one to face this ultimate challenge..! With my 48 inches of frame at that time, I think now, that I posed a formidable challenge to my challenge on the wall. But it didn’t feel that way in my mind.

..because, what I was staring at, was a no-nonsense live 5-inch-wall lizard crawling on the wall in front of me..

The women folks (namely my mother and sister) were expecting me to get rid of it.. they were actually looking up to me for a change.. and the lizard, ironically, was looking down upon me..! Man vs animal.. I sensed that rush of adrenaline and somehow remembered the Gunfight at the O.K.Corral, Dual in the Sun, the cowboys, the showdowns, the fast draws, the low slung holsters, you know the cowboys facing each other for a shootout.. [gestures] So who makes the first move.. the lizard or I..? We were armed too – I was armed with a stick and the lizard was armed with his ugly, repulsive self, which was precisely what I was chosen to destroy!

Life looked unfair to me at that point, being a man.. I could not stand aside and be a spectator like my mother or sister. I had to be the sinner, the cruel murderer and also the victim who would’ve to live with that memory throughout the rest of his life and sleep through the nightmares.

There was no choice, there simply wasn’t any choice left for me….. I lived through that moment, the lizard didn’t..

From that day onwards, the man in me has had to step up to the plate and do the honors – or dishonors..! I never got used to it, but I could never get away from it either. The world was cruel.. it made me do things that IT did not want to do. It chose to be timid but did not allow the same luxury to ME. It chose to remain clean, but made ME dirty in the process.. Given a choice, I would’ve walked away from it all.. but the society wouldn’t let me.

Whether it was getting rid of the pests, or going in the dark to see if someone was hiding there, or opening the door if someone knocked in the middle of the night, or tell you what, we had this really old malfunctioning radio and one would get a small electric shock off of it sometimes.. so it was like “can you check if it is giving an electric shock today?…???”, or you know, lifting heavy luggage even though I probably weighed less than 100 pounds that time.. but I had to carry the heavier bag when my father wasn’t around, or letting my sister have the empty seat in a crowded bus even if I might have spent the whole day standing up, or just getting a blanket.. We used to have these family reunions when the number of people sometimes exceeded the number of blankets! I was put on the lower priority list…

on all these occasions, the man in me had to take the back seat.. !

Switch to present times, different house.. Country – USA, My role – head of the family, Situation – mouse spotted inside the house, allegedly holed up in the kitchen pantry, Task – Remove everything from the pantry and look for the mouse, Spectators – Wife and a 5 yr old son who claims to be “super brave”..

By now, the situation is not new to me, the same adrenaline rush, the fear that has been denied an outlet, the fake bravery that gets called into action..  I open the door of the pantry… Now understand this, I have to appear brave not only to my wife but even more so to my son!! I start pulling stuff out from the shelves, one by one.. I know the mouse is hiding somewhere in there, watching me, watching my every move.. from behind some bag of chips.. contemplating when to leap.. Every shelf I clear without the mouse jumping out, makes my face happy but worries my scared mind.. ‘coz it increases the probability of finding it on the NEXT shelf..!

I have my son feeling proud of seeing his father going after the mouse so fearlessly, my wife is admiring my guts as I pull out the things without the slightest bit of ‘visible fear’.. Just as I am getting downright reckless in my search.. something black falls down! Eeeesshh! My heart almost pops out of my mouth, but out of sheer habit, I don’t show it. Because, without anybody noticing, my senses have already made sure that it wasn’t a mouse.. I even manage to give my son and my wife that look of – “Got scared eh?”! … Years of practice.. years of practice has gone into faking this bravado.. Anyway, the search goes on.

Thankfully the mouse has vanished.. or wasn’t there at all. He saved me a clumsy moment where I would’ve been scared and acting brave at the same time..!

Later that night, my wife wakes up around 1 o’clock, wanting some water.. Nobody wants to go down in the dark ‘coz the mouse hasn’t been caught yet. So who gets to go?? ME!! Being the brave man-of-the-house, I have to venture out into the darkness of the kitchen to get some water… I come down.. I don’t turn on the lights, don’t want to disturb the intruder, you know, I don’t want to see you, you don’t want to see me.. let’s just leave it at that.. kind of thing!… So I start tiptoeing across the dark kitchen… not knowing what lies in that darkness………………

and I was thinking..

… yes, that’s the price you pay – for being a man……………

I am going to tell you a story today.. I visited my dentist recently with a nervous smile on my face.. After a small wait I found myself in this comfortable looking chair that packed two thousand different positions and adjustments to make me presentable to this dentist! Sitting there.. perched up high in that chair, under the huge “limelight”, I was mentally preparing myself.. remembering all the ice creams and chocolates I ate, my last night’s BBQ party.. the smiles, memories, my whole life flashing by in front of my eyes.. thinking about how everyone else in the world is happily living their life away from this torture chamber! Now that’s not fair!!!

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When I was in high school, I took Biology as an elective besides Electronic Instrumentation. I don’t remember why I did that especially since I was never cut to be a doctor. I certainly did not know back then, what I was getting into..

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I was never a stage person. Every time I tried to do that when I was in school or college, I could not hide the fact that I was nervous. I have sung on stage, spoken a few words, received prizes, given a brief thank you speech.. but all that, quite reluctantly. If I had my way, I would love to receive an award in a jungle or sing a song in my bathroom and transmit it to the world – err, I mean the audio of it

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