Long before the tag ‘superwoman’ was invented, my mother was one. A gold medalist at nineteen, a political prisoner soon after, a lecturer in her twenties, a PhD at sixty, a cancer survivor at seventy-one, she has seen it all. She, however, has one handicap. She is technologically challenged. That is why when she returned from Netherlands in 1965 after a nine-month scholarship, she carried dozens of post cards but no photographs. She possessed a camera, she confessed, but never learnt to operate it!In the mid-s’70s, when we stayed in a college campus in Delhi University she once asked me to switch off the transistor before I left the house. Seeing me flummoxed, she sheepishly explained that she did not know how to switch it off. For a woman who could traipse through Europe, this, I knew, would be child’s play. So I taught her how to do it. When I returned, the transistor was off, but not because she was an apt pupil. ‘‘I waylaid a visitor going towards the girls hostel,’’ she said, ‘‘and asked him to switch it off.’’On her 75th birthday, I presented her with a mobile phone. ‘‘Now we will not wait in suspense when she doesn’t return home till late at night’’, said my brother. The problem was how to teach her how to use it. When she dialed a landline number she forgot to add the STD code to it. When she clicked on the stored numbers she was stumped by the right button to press. Once when I rang her up I found her phone was dead. ‘‘I didn’t check on the phone, since it never rang,’’ she said. When she went to attend a ‘‘satsang’’ while staying with me for a weekend, and didn’t return till 9 pm, I was frantic. Ringing up her number, I found it ringing in my room. ‘‘I left the cellphone behind ,’’ she retorted,‘‘What if I had left it in the auto?’’The other day I received a frantic phone call. ‘‘I think the cellphone is lost,’’ she said. I immediately rang up her number and my nephew picked it up. He had borrowed it from her purse to make a call. Mom was relieved. ‘‘You could have done it yourself and saved us this anxiety,’’ I said. ‘‘Well’’, she confessed, ‘‘I couldn’t, since I don’t remember my cellphone number!’’
