Musings of a White Haired Teenager

The generation dilemma. I am not aging the way I am supposed to. This is a problem. I have a 10-year-old trapped in a body that has countable years left. Interestingly, from the moment you are born, you have countable years left, but you don’t seem to notice it until you can count them with your ten fingers. That's when you start to realize that there will come a point when the people around you will miss you for a bit and move on with their countable years. The insignificance of my existence stares me in my face when I realize that there is no reason for anyone to remember me. I have asked this in an earlier posting: Will you be offended if someone your family invited to your death ceremony did not show up? I have done this to people, and I have felt guilty, but will you be a forgiving dead and understand that you were not as important as you thought you were. Based on all possible statistics, and correcting for improvements in medical technology, I should be dust to dust, or just...

Who do you really love? A question that poets and authors have struggled with and written in great degree over Centuries. But that was before WhatsApp (WA). Completely encrypted messages sent over the security of a phone that might be equally secure with all kinds of protection. In many countries such as Brazil and India, WA has taken the people by storm. I myself am a member of several WA groups that deal with all kinds of content and contexts. But WA is essentially a personal messaging system - one on one - and that is where it gets interesting. There used to be a time when people would wake up and get to their computer to check their email. Now, it is in bed, multiple phones, and the gentle twinkle, sometimes personalized to the special person, that wakes one up, or a message a simple: "Morning" or "Hi" sent early in the morning that begins the day. Now, wonder who gets that first message? That first message of the day, the anticipation of the response, the disap...

Work at home. There used to be a particularly interesting slogan that said a variation of "behind every successful man there is a woman." In an anomalous way it simultaneously denigrated both the genders, or elevated both. There seems to be a certain presumption of the metric of success. The woman has no success other than the success of the man which the woman is motivating. This saying takes on a different meaning in a World where the rush to remote work has become a pandemic by itself. The pandemic provoked a certain kind of work where the place of work and the place of leisure conflated on the dining table during the numerous lockdowns across the World. The notion of work from home (WFH) became commonplace. But it also exposed a form of work whose history far predates the romance with WFH. That work is the nameless work at home (WAH) which is only acknowledged, obliquely, in the saying about the woman motivating the success of the man. But for generations people have done...