Mundane Musings

Sometime in the early nineties, when I was in school, when the eight-letter word C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R was considered nothing less than a machine with divine intelligence (and they called it AI!), capable of performing tasks ranging from processing of complicated accounts in a grocery store to launching of a rocket in NASA, I remember this funny poster (printed from an incredibly slow and lowest quality dot-matrix printer) stuck outside my computer lab in school that said, "Software inside, footwear outside"; as if, the computer lab were a place of worship and the computers themselves, the avtaars of gods! Not to forget the lab in-charge staff and computer sirs/ma'ams, who were considered messengers of these gods. All this hype, for a couple of old and rickety 386 machines with MS-DOS (one of them even had Windows 95!) installed in them! Whenever we passed the computer lab, we'd see the staffs sitting in front of the computer, with their legs crossed and fingers on their c

The next time you sermonize, better think twice. It might just turn against you, like how it happened to this news reporter. But, it all really depends on how well you carry yourself. Such a situation can be handled in three different ways - The Jim-Carrey-method Graciously evade the topic on a funny note, by uttering a few gags. The Tom-Hanks-method Get serious, become an object of demonstration and say, "Hey look, this is what I meant! So, beware!" The Chandler-method Careful. You need to be extremely skilled in doing this. Enact bullets one and two above, alternatively and with style! Now, watch this video...