I'd always wanted to present the person I admire most - Dad - a PC. Way back in 1998 itself, I had carted a completely knocked-down PC from Delhi to Trivandrum, on Indian Railways - a distance of over 3,500 kilometers! The knocked-down parts of the PC proved to be my undoing, for one look at the various strange-looking parts and dad ordered me to take it all away! There were too many parts to a PC and any of these could go kaput anytime, was his considered opinion!

His three children were spread all over – I was at Delhi, my younger sister at Mumbai and the youngest sister at Singapore. Dad was 76 (78 now!) and our visits home were getting to be less frequent, as we were all caught up in our own lives. From Delhi, I was able to visit him once in about 2 years, while my sister at Mumbai, an Airlines employee, was able to make it more frequently, at about once in 6 months. With the youngest one and her husband - both Doctors - working at Singapore, their chances of visiting him weren’t much better than mine too. Of course we spoke on the phone, but then long-distance calls can only be limited and short, in a country that only had one telecom service provider - that too a government entity - for a long, long time! Moreover, dad preferred the written form of communications. He had always written us beautiful letters, when we were away studying. Then, we siblings were irregular at replying… ours, after all, is the SMS generation!

It was after some persuasion that dad finally agreed to go in for a mobile phone, in 2005. Surprisingly, for an Economist who had spent 35 years in government employment, he took to it very well and soon, was SMS-ing us like an eager teenager! But then, dad loved writing long letters in flowing English – and his repertoire of words is phenomenal to this day! The 160-characters limit on SMSs on his Nokia cramped his style severely! So while the mobile phone built up his confidence at using electronic gadgets, he found that it still didn’t quite suit his needs.

Around this time, dad took it upon himself to edit the Colony Newsletter. It suited him to a 'T' and very soon, he realized that with a PC, he could be much more productive and creative, apart from cutting costs for the Newsletter. Since it had to be published out of a shoestring budget, the idea caught his fancy and he capitulated, when I put forth the idea of getting him a Notebook, in April 2006. I got him a Notebook (as opposed to a Desktop) as I remembered just how intimidated he was, by the large number of parts that could break down in a Desktop. With a Notebook, he wouldn't ever get to see it's insides and hence, nothing to panic about, I reasoned to myself! Moreover, his requirements weren’t that of a power-user: a simple e-Mail client, Browser, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Image Viewer, ability to watch an occasional movie on CD or DVD, a file compressor to unzip the files we would send him over e-Mail, Acrobat Reader for reading interesting stuff we sent him from time to time… that pretty much summed up his requirements from a Computer.

Two years later now, he is still charmed by his “LapDog” as he calls it, sending all of us e-Mails by the dozen, exchanging pictures and attachments and browsing the Net for whatever piece of knowledge it is that tickles his curiosity on a given day! Stuff that was just not possible with his mobile phone! Although the Colony Newsletter was discontinued long ago, he has written a lot more in these two years than he imagined he would, when he agreed to let me get him a Notebook! Most importantly, he actually looks forward to his half-hour session everyday with his LapDog, to carefully compose us an e-Mail and shoot it across to us!

My work, first with an IT Market Research organization and then as the Chief Information Officer of an IT magazines publishing group kept me in touch with IT Trends as they happened. Apart from procuring and maintaining the corporate Computers, Networks, Internet, e-Mail and enterprise software, my friendly advice on scores of PC-related stuff has been sought over the years by so many people. And not just by IT-novices!