Slide to Unlock

Connecting the dots in hindsight

It’s been 7 years since Steve Jobs passed.

I look back and am amazed at the technology journey he’s compelled me to travel - a completely gadget averse, screen averse person.

I love music. (Can’t underscore it enough!) Being a quintessential ’90s kid, had my music in bits and pieces, but I never had it all together. I had a giant CD case which held 100+ CDs, and I was too lazy to open and search for the right CD and put into a player.

My iPod changed that. (I was uncharacteristically, one of its earliest adopters.)

Music was always my life, and now, it became my life. I spent most of my time addicted to earphones. On the run. On the commute. In the night. As I awoke. And in doing so, I became a more…sorted person. I became a better thinker. It helped clear the cobwebs, it helped evaporate the unwanted or negative.

Cut to 12 years later — today, I do exactly this on my phone. Without my earphones, I am a fuzzy, little-bit-lost kind of person.

About 12 odd years ago, technology was hitting that boom time. But it was always elusive to me (because of the aforementioned averseness). I would check my email, look up stuff on the Internet, but only sporadically. Then the iPad came. And that changed (like how!) my perception of information access.

‘Slide to unlock’.

That’s all I had to do. And unlock I did. A world of information. Email. Tickets for a play, movie, event. My favourite sitcoms. Any book I wanted to read. A host of angry birds and Talking Toms.

(Cut to today. I can safely say that my phone is the key enabler of every fact based conversation — and sometimes, opinion-based, as well, thanks to Medium and Pinterest).

I became a fan. An iTouch followed, then the iPhone 4. And as the years progressed, the numbers ahead of my phone progressed too. And 2 years ago, a hardcore Windows user, I made the shift to a MacBook.

Today most of my gadgets have a half bitten apple on its back.

My kids are listening to Bombay Jayashree’s Vatsalyam, as I pen my thoughts. The first is on my phone and the second is on my MacBook. Every Sunday I see my transcontinental family via FaceTime. Its been a journey for old-fashioned me.

‘It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.’

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for making our hearts sing.

That's the passion it takes, I guess, to create that kind of a legacy.