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When computers make you cry
YOU know, there is that cliche about computers controlling people’s lives.? Well.l always thought that that's all that it is, a cliche only till this week. It actually hit me that I am dependent on my PC, really, .really dependent on it. Sure, I can survive without it but iCsjust not the same. It’s like Coke,you know.l can survive without Coke but life would just not be exactly the same. Or may be I can’t survive without Coke, I don’t know.
As you can guess from my infinite rambling, I am the sort of person who writes a lot A lot You know how we’ve all exchanged notes with our friends in Chemistry classes (and all otherclasses, for that matter) while making sure that it escapes the prying eyes of our teachers? Well, I have a history with those notes.Often, while waiting for my response, my friends were known to hiss at me, "Are you writing a novel or something?" Well, no, I haven’t written a complete novel in Economics class (yet) but yeah, I admit that I tend to write a lot.That’s because I like writing, no,I love writing. Even when my arm feels like it’s dying from pain or when it’s three o’clock in the morning or when my exam is seventeen hours away. It’s something I just have to do, it’s innate.
Anyway, so here’s the thing. Over the last year or more, I had been writing almost regularly. Not only for people to read them, but also for my own pteasure.Plays,short stories, poems,real-life stuff, you name it. I didn't like talking about them, except when it came to my closest friends. But even If not everyone might agree on them being great, I loved my writings. Not because I thought they deserved the Booker Prize, but simply because they were me, pure, unadulterated me on paper. Except, you see, technically, they were not on paper. They were inside my PC, on the C driveof my hard disk to be precise.
Remember the poem in Class Four? About that old donkey Nicholas Nye? Well, I think that in one of the stanzas, the poet said something like: All good things must come to an end. At the age of ten, I found that saying to be so... profound. Wow. I mean, I always had an inkling about good things getting over at a point. I mean, the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar wouldn’t last forever. Weekends were over before you knew it McGyver lasted only a couple of minutes on BTV. But the way the poet put it in that poem! All good things must cometoanend.lneverthought of putting it so exactly, so beautifully.
But when the 'good things" for me did come to an end, I didn’t find it so beautiful. In fact I was devastated. While on the noble mission of upgrading my prehistoric PC, we had to remove theold hard disk and get a new, bigger one. All my work, including my 600 page journal that i had saved in the old hard disk were erased-They were
just gone. And it never occurred to me that this would happen.
Now I know people grieve about bigger things in life. But you know what I realised? That hard disc WAS part of my life. It contained written memories of years of my life, each and every day recorded to be read years from now. It contained myjuvenile literature, the fruits of my wild imagination, my despair-induced attempts at poetry. What got erased wasn't just data; it’s like me who got erased.
My survival strategy is not to think about the great tragedies in the world. Because when you sit yourself down and think about all that is wrong in the world, all the famine in Africa, the wars in Middle East, the poverty two streets away, you can't survive. When you really concentrate, and I mean when you intensely focus on every tear of a just orphaned child or someone the age of your younger brother dying of starvation, you won't be able to sleep at night So what you do is stop thinking. Just switch that brain of yours off.
As human beings, we were born selfish. And in taking the full liberty of my selfishness, I am not ashamed to say that I grieved over my lost work. It's nothing compared to all the terrible things that happen to people who deserve it far less than I would have. But I grieve still. For can you write the same thing again? Can I ever capture what I did before? Do you feel the same essence of an experience twice? I don't even remember what I did a week before; how can I trace back a wholeyearofmylife?
So it’s not just a cliche, you see. Computers are starting tocontrol our lives.1 know, it certainly did mine. And I'm still in mourning.
By Maliha Bassam