Hey Bro, what does this word ‘Ambidextrous’ mean? said the obnoxiously intelligent looking teen to his nerdier companion. The friend smirked in disgust and answered “Ambidextrous defines a person who is comfortable with both the Windows interface as well as the Mac-OS”.

Before I could blunder into the conversation and make necessary course corrections, the kids harrumphed and ran off somewhere to play Cops & Robbers with their respective computoys. Leaving me feeling handicapped since I was of the vintage that believed that mastering one OS (in my case Windows) was more than sufficient to keep my grey matter in tune. Trying to learn the intricacies of more systems than one would surely prove to overload my poor brain I convinced myself.

While I fortified my island of comfort and fought off several camouflaged attempts to sneak into my life. As I-Phones taught us the trick of flicking pages and the magic of touch screen, even the magic mouse that the macs paired up with showed us how our fingers could squeeze more or less from the images on screen. Then came the I-Pads. And those were tough tablets to swallow.

Giving wings to 3G scams the wafer thin screen that concealed fairly awesome computing power became an official addendum to the corporate hand package. And tables breathed a sigh of relief as they took on less weight and freed up a lot of real estate.

But for those of us who were still stuck in a time warp that illustrated a computer’s word processing skills and perhaps its calculating prowess at best, all this made no sense at all. Content with Word and Excel and some simple graphics the UI (User Interface) was attractive enough even if it did not feature the bells and whistles functionality of the fruit based machines.

Then disaster struck the Apple. Steve Jobs who was the brain behind the brains died suddenly leaving behind a legacy of innovation and radical change of habits. And William Tell’s face contorted into angry frustration as the arrow missed the fruit on the head and knocked senselessly at the bark of the deadwood tree behind.

I paid my respects to the genius and lamented his passing on. But heart of heart I was grateful for the breather that his death provided us dinosaurs. Windows could take its own sweet time playing catch-up and we could rest assured that laptops were not due to become extinct for a while yet. And that CD players and music systems were still a valid entertainment option.

Now, all that we wait for is for Gates and his Microsoft behemoth to unload the truckloads of oranges so the road to empowered digital domains becomes as squishy as the auction yard at Nagpur where the citrus fruit is celebrated by the basket.

And for the Californian variety to blush again in sun-kist splendour. Ummmmm.