Growing up on screen

Video calling,once a feature of sci-fi movies but now a taken-for-granted fixture in our lives,has among its most common users the two most unlikely groupsthe above 50 and the below 5. Toddlers cant hold a telephonic conversation for too long and grandparents would rather frown at our dependence and time spent on the Internet. But in video-calling,the two groups have come together. Though its difficult to know what one- or two-year-olds think of digitised faces of their grandparents,the latter have warmed up to this subtly humane aspect of technology.

Anil Gupta,64,a retired media consultant in Delhi,who chats every weekend with his four-year-old granddaughter,Reya,in Boston,says,The best part about webcam chatting is that the kids recognise you when you visit them, he says. When Gupta visited Boston last year,Reya rushed to get a piece of paper in which she had scribbled indeterminate figures of her grandparents. She would show the same drawings to us on the webcam, says Gupta. His wife Urmila,65,is happy she isnt missing out on Reyas growing-up. Watching them grow up is very fulfilling, she says. 

In a way telephone calls or e-mailed photos never could,live webcam images give my father the satisfaction that Samina and her children are doing fine. But virtual proximity also sharpens the geographical distance,making Gupta pine for Reya even more. When I utter the word tennis,Reya rushes to the cupboard to get a racquet,brings it near the screen and as her little body attempts to fling it,she topples over. Seeing such a wondrous sight gives me a lump in my throat, he says emotionally.  

With the Internet aiding emotional bonding in families,birthdays and festivals are also celebrated on the webcam. On Reyas fourth birthday,Gupta telephoned his son Siddharth,asking him to log on immediately. It was early morning in Bostonan unusual time for chatting since the Guptas always chatted when it was evening there. When Siddharth logged on,he was surprised to see his parents wearing birthday hats and singing the Happy Birthday jingle around a cake with candles lit on it. Reya,still half-asleep,was overjoyed to see the party and blew the candles.  

For my father,watching Romeesa and Nabeela turn up in their Eid clothes and coyly reach out to the eidi he hands out to the screen is as good as being there. 

Webcam chatting is like one big party. Once,Urmila,our younger son who had come to visit us from Mumbai,my mother and I had gathered to chat with our sons family. It was a perfect Kodak moment,a great family re-union on the web, says Gupta. 

Grandparents go through the computer learning curve to help reach out to their grandchildren. When Deepak Shenoy visited India in June from Boston,he got his parents a laptop with a built-in camera. His mother had never operated a computer before and his retired father knew nothing of the Internet beyond reading mails. Deepak taught them to turn on the laptop and connect to the Internet. He downloaded Skype and taught them how to make video calls. Currently,his folks only use Skype and the only feature of the programme they use is making and accepting video calls.

The children have their own reasons for teaching their parents to learn to chat with the toddlers. It dilutes the feeling of guilt I have about living away from my folks and depriving them of the joy of playing with their grandchildren, says Shenoy whose four-year-old Trisha showed her grandparents the Christmas gifts she got including a digicam and a teddy bear.

Its difficult to fathom what little minds understand of big things such as the Internet. But the fact that they have been exposed to it at as tender an age such as 10 days oldwhen Samina first flashed Nabeela to my fatherhas acquainted them with technology. Which is why Romeesa understands that the chocolate bar is unreachable. Earlier,she would actually believe she could reach it,but when she failed a couple of times,she realised that its a joke and now she herself has fun by pretending to reach it, says her mother.

Reya too understands that her grandparents are not just random faces talking on the screen. She feels shy and hides away from us. You never hide away from a picture or TV. But she knows that we are real people living somewhere and talking to her, says Gupta.
Nayoki,whos eight months old,is already used to the camera,says her grandmother Rita Singh. I have seen my son Puneet bathing Nayoki,wrapping her in a towel and dressing her up. She looks comfy as she makes poses and smiles at me, she says.

Nayoki made it to the cyberspace even before she was born in the form of e-mailed copies of her mothers pregnancys report. Puneet once called and asked me to check my mail immediately. As I was looking at the scanned medical document,I got scared but before I could guess,he announced,You are looking at your grandchild,sending me into a happy howl, says Singh,whos sure the baby will jump into her lap when she travels to Toronto for her first birthday. Till then,video calling will keep the two generations connected.