#debsaristories #ninetieskids #personalcomputers Remember to remember rocks and springs! These are two powerful tools for life balance. When life pulls you down to the bottom of the ocean and gives you pain, remember to "spring up" so you don't settle down and fret forever, instead spring up to the surface! When life pushes you up to the sky and gives you success and happiness, remember to stay grounded like a "rock", and not get carried away. Just a word of caution - please dont mix match the above. "Springing up" during happiness leads to pride, "Staying rock bottom" during pain and testing times leads to depression!

I was collecting unused printouts to be reused for notes and other stuff. And zoomed back in time to the nineties. The time when the superpower only next to God visited earth. It was called the personal computer. I remember the first time our suburb school had established a "computer room" which was treated more sacred than a temple. We removed shoes, tiptoed quietly into the only air conditioned room in the entire school campus besides the chairman's office. Fingers trembled as we pressed any key on the dull creamish keyboard. The black screen was scary too. With much care and extreme caution after many stares and warnings from the sophisticated-of-all computer teachers at school, we would successfully get a circle or square on the screen. The amount of "programming" was overwhelming and the results almost gave us noble prize feeling. Who cares the black socks stink as we sit there in that 'temple' without shoes, working on the invention of our century and the newly entered being into our lives. Those who could afford to have a home computer automatically upgraded themselves into the wealthy elite category. The air conditioned room in their home was maintained with utmost care and hygiene so as to not infect the most precious possession with "virus". Yup we took it literal then. The bright clear monitors with spectacular resolution without flicker was nothing less than magic to us. After all our balck and white television sets (close comparison but distant cousin) had grains all over, needed an antenna (and someone to yell from terrace) to adjust picture quality and most often would blank out with buzzing noise. This marvel creature called computer did not! As for me, I completed my computer engineering without owning a computer. Like there is no mysore in mysore bonda right? 🤗🤗 chalta hai. Jugaad pe duniya qayam hai.

Very soon banks were "computerised" The print out paper from banks would sometimes end up home for our rough work, when dad would bring them. The dot matrix printer had typed something we could not comprehend but the neatly hole punched margins were amusing to me. Little did I know then, this day would come where those devices in several quantities would become part of lives, storing our memories as photos, storing our knowledge in folders and drives, storing our lives in emails and cloud .... like how one day in future I could imagine a robot making me masala tea and also sitting with me to sip as I narrate these stories to it (him/her? Unisex?)

For now its chai time for me and my chai buddy - baba (father in law).
I humbly chose this drape that ma picked during her last visit to Puri.