priya tuli's randombloggz

Ten years ago, I didn't know what a keyboard was...and I didn't want to. Period. Today, I'm umbilically connected to my laptop. I get anxiety attacks every time my cable goes on the fritz. Email (and telepathy) are my preferred forms of communication, and I have begun to speak Instant Messaging language (which will soon take over the entire Universe), even when I'm not on Instant Messenger.

All this doesn't make me tech-savvy, unfortunately. Although I'm still a megatechdweeb and blue-screen still reduces me to gibberingwreckstatus, I'm amazed at the way my entire life has been abducted by my alienmonitor. I do try resisting, once in a half-hearted while, but it's far easier to succumb.

So I end up spending hours glued to my chair, hunched over the keyboard till my fingers freeze into perma-type position and my right shoulder locks up. My butt goes numb, my wrist lets me know it's mad at the mouse again, and my eyes see Arial Narrow imprinted across everything, including the catt's tail. Ahh, technology.

I look around at the shelves stacked high with my books, and sigh. I do still read voraciously… nothing surpasses the sheer tactility and familiar, tangible heft of a book. (Yes, I know where paper comes from and it does give me nightmares. So do tsunamis, geckos and US presidents called Bush.)

And I think of the youngsters of today and tomorrow who will never get on intimate terms with dead trees as we did. They will never know the pleasures of can't-put-it-down all-night readathons. Of flipping back to re-read that passage one more time. Of reading right through the entire book to get to the last page even though you're dying to peek and find out how it all ends.

And yet, there's such a vast repository of information on the web, even I've become an inveterate surfer. I've stopped referring to print encyclopaedias any more, because there is nothing you can't find on the net. Isn't that amazing.

I have looked up colon polyps, yoga asanas, cruises, Pavarotti, arachnids, breakfast cereal, ingrown toenails, Chengis Khan, drosophila... truly, the web is a trivia-fiend's paradise. And though I also use www.webster.com a lot, I will nevereverever give up my real-time dead-tree dictionary. I've had it so long, another few years and it's an antique. Besides, it was my favourite bed-time read in my schooldays, when I'd run out of things to read.

Net-net, web-surfing will never replace reading books, not for me anyway. As in info-source, yes. As an alternative to the pleasures of a good read, curled up on the couch on a rainy afternoon? Nope. Not in this lifetime. I've already planted several trees in exchange, in order to assuage the dead-tree guilt. One of them's a teak tree. It's 2 years old and in all that time, it's only put out 3 new leaves. Wonder how many years it'll take to provide enough paper for a good read...

I must've been a self-confessed Islandholic for at least the last several lifetimes. There's something about oceanic expanses of water and sandy beaches that I have never been able to resist, ever since I was knee-high to a flea; large land masses just don't cut it for me. How strange, then, that I've lived most of this lifetime in a land-locked city, a situation that needs to be remedied as soon as possible.

Therefore, if any of you own an island and need a house-sitter while you're off jet-setting or clinching yet another business deal, I'd gladly offer my services plus those of my catts, two of whom are excellent mousers. The rest are just fraidycatts...

Apart from the beaches and sunsets and the susurrus of the waves, the other thing I love about islands is the way every day has a holiday texture to it. A lot of that has to do with the locals, whom I call Island People, no matter where in the world they are. They seem to be a whole different breed of humanity altogether... open, friendly, laid-back and very "manyana". (I know, phonetic spelling, this silly page won't let me use a tilde!)

Island life is largely about taking things as they come and enjoying the day, which revolves around children, family, community, eating, drinking, dancing, music, the sea. The fact that they are separated from the mainland by an expanse of sea seems to inure Island People to the vicissitudes of mainland life. Nothing is important enough to cause an all-out stress-attack; nothing is so urgent it cannot be put off till tomorrow.

They instinctively know something that we haven't yet learnt...that each day is a new day, and deserves to be lived for what it is, and not rushed through in the race to tomorrow.

They have watched the sea turn from calm to stormy and then calm again... just as life does, as love does. They see the parallels and understand them and accept them at a deep, cellular level. Our mainland concerns have no meaning here...they pale into the insignificance of nothingness. These people seem born to an innate island wisdom; a wisdom that empowers them to live life simply and fully, a day at a time. A wisdom we city-slickers and mainland dwellers would do well to emulate.

Me? I'm making a start on my long-deferred conversion to "Island People" status by instantly trashing all my deadlines. As of now, my official mantra is "manyana"!!!

The first 10 years of my life, I hated being a girl.

I had 6 male cousins, assorted ages, who would regularly line up at the end of the garden and hold "whocanpeethefurthest" contests. Guess who was always the referee that got beaten up?? Yep, me. Because guess who always won? Yep, the youngest.

The next few decades, I hated being a woman. Hated being the first to have to wear a bra in my class. First to start the bleeds and that teenage angst&crappolastuff. Being a tomboy didn't help the brand image either, and though I loved that the guys treated me like "one of the guys", sometimes I'd get miffed and none of us could figure why... not even me. That was also around the time we were all trying to get on first-name terms with our hormones.

The 20's whizzed by in a major serotonin rush punctuated with manic depressive cycles, self esteem issues, guys, university, the spaced-out alternative reality of smoking grass, first job, the evils of booze, second job... We were that lost generation between "stay-at-home moms" and "career women", still nameless because nobody had coined that term yet. We had stereotypes to break, and new paradigms to launch. We were The New Woman. Yayyy! (Gah!!!)

Around age 30, I grudgingly accepted the fact that unless I wanted drastic surgical intervention (which I didn't, I mean what would I do with my lifetime collection of party bras), nothing much was going to change so I had better start accepting my gender, never mind gracefully.

At age 40, I actually started to enjoy being a woman, in a tentative sort of way. And then they changed the rules again. Once more, I was first off the starting block and bang-splatt into the ChangeOfLife. Perimenopause, I learnt, is that long last sigh between bleeds where everything about you goes into reverse gear at 110mph. You get worse PMS than you did in your teens, which was so long ago you have no memories from there anyway. And headaches, which you now suspect might be an armada of aneurysms waiting to implode when you're not looking. And that's just the start.

You hear voices and it's nobody you know. You don't want to hug anyone because they'll think you forgot to towel off after your shower. You walk into a meeting where the temperature would make a polar bear frisky and you break into a hot flash. You start saying something and three words later, you forget what.

Wait, there's more. Your body smells like you borrowed it from a tennis ace when all the exercise you do is walk to the fridge. Your skin starts a slow crawl over your body and slips right off every so often. Joints you never knew you had, start screaming for mercy even when you're curled up in foetal position and barely breathing. Then your heart starts palpitating so fast you're sure it's going to trip some vital circuit inside you.

Finally, at 4 am, when you should be asleep but you're not because you're still canoodling with InSomNeah, you leap out of bed and dash into a cold shower to chase away the 59,800^th hot flash of the day. This is the age when you really get socked into all your unknown body-parts and what they do. And sometimes wonder, in an intellectual sort of way, about what if they don't.

Now it's different for every woman, as all the books will hasten to tell you, but chances are you'll experience at least 50% to 80% of this stuff purely on the basis of your gender. A select few (possibly the same select few that got pregnant despite their IUD) will be unfortunate enough to actually experience every last symptom in all of those books... and then some.

Then they'll do a case-study on those few (statistics, you understand), and a whole new slew of books will have to be written. More trees will have to be cut down in virgin rainforests to produce the paper for those. Resulting, of course, in more illegal logging and greater ozone depletion and more global warming... so you see how they're going to pin that whole disaster on us women as well. But that's another story...