A No-Mo Moment In The New Year

The New Year loses its sheen after the hoopla is over. Having thrown off the party hat, it dons everyday clothes settling into the humdrum routine of a calendar year. It may even get into the ‘goblin mode’ to be ‘with it’ in the post-Covid attire preferences.

I have resolved that I won’t make any new year resolutions! Sounds familiar? Well, I am joining hordes of many other realistic folk with a similar stance or maybe I fall in the taxonomic category of Homo Sapiens with weak resolve, you flip the coin. But this much can be proven that, generally, resolutions made with solid fervour at the onset of the brand new year dissolve pretty soon in the hurly burly of life.

But I do have one resolve as a senior citizen, traumatised by the ever proliferating tech-disruptions, that I will not fiddle with phone settings. I discovered to my rising horror being locked out of my mobile by venturing into phone settings. A panicky NoMo moment, my phone in its AI controlled attitude decided to go into emergency mode and denied me access unless I keyed in the pin.

I haven’t had a screen lock ever since I got the phone, so it was a total googly. I was truly stumped! But it is in my DNA as a Kashmiri to never give up hope. And the fables we read in school days like the one of Robert Bruce, the King of Scots, and the Spider prodded me to persist. I wasn’t going to let a little gadget thwart me from my own cyberspace.

Set a thief to catch a thief! I went to my fall-back device, my iPad to seek help from the indomitable combo of Google and YouTube to break this phone deadlock. With some persistence after trying some hacks suggested online, I managed to gain entry after being prompted to set a pin.

A minor triumph in the new year, though I lost my stored music and conversations on WhatsApp.(Not such a calamity). I had my Apps back after keying in my passwords. Hallelujah that I keep my passwords in a small spiral diary.

Passwords should be renamed ‘fail words!’. You are asked to verify your passwords and also verify that you are not a robot. The sheer cheek of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test) to question our humanity!

Google as the leading search engine plunges you into a rabbit hole of information. Sometimes, I drink from the ‘vial’ of info and grow tall like Alice. At times I shrink into a midget because of ignorance in the face of cascading information tumbling down on me.

There was a time when we used to pour over the volumes of the venerable ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ for embellishing a tutorial paper or just satiate our information anxiety syndrome. Alas, it is now confined to dusty corners of the house, if not sold to the raddiwala! That seems to be like the Stone Age now in this era of digital wizardry.

With rusting synapses as one grows long in the tooth (mostly toothless!), one has to live by chits and not by one’s wits. But quite often to find the right chits in the house or one’s bag is almost an impossible feat. One needs to have aide-mémoires strewn around the house to zero in on the object hiding in plain sight! But despite the tech-disruptions we oldies have seen, we’ve managed to play catch-up somehow.