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One of the most common ailments of old age is fear...fear of having to learn new things, new gadgets, new technologies, and new ideas. It is due to mental inertia...chaltha hai chalne do!
Even Einstein was not immune from it.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or
depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas.
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My Shakespeare Uncle never learned riding a pushbike although he was master of swimming...the village in which he grew up had streams and ponds but no high-tech gadgets like pushbikes in the 1900s. And when he found that I was surreptitiously learning to ride a borrowed bike using half-pedal technology, he was so scared that I would fall and break my neck that he complained about me to his mom...he was 60 then and she was 75...
Air India has decided that it's the matronly air hostesses that are its Achilles' heel and is demanding a makeover. The snappy aunties will be replaced by younger (err... that's what Air India thinks 45-year-olds are) and better-dressed attendants. This has drawn praise from those who've faced the ire of a stern Air India stewardess in the past, and flak from most, considering that Air India has never really been, well, subtle before either. Remember when they openly fired air-hostesses for being too fat? Can hostesses be behind an airline's failure?
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-13/people/30145639_1_air-hostesses-air-india-kingfisher-airlines
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One of the most common ailments of old age is fear...fear of having to learn new things, new gadgets, new technologies, and new ideas. It is due to mental inertia...chaltha hai chalne do!
Even Einstein was not immune from it.
Look at his picture above. He must be in his 70s (like I am now) when he made that silly comment attributed to him. It is simply childish. The day he was fearing has duly arrived. Little Ishani (3+) is its epitome.
My son gifted me a high-end Nokia Asha of that time a few years ago vetoing my vehement protestations. All I wanted to achieve was to call people and talk, send a message, click a picture, and check my mails on the go. But the devil he gave me came with a couple of dozen icons I never dared explore.
But semi-literate Ishani has mastered all of them. I never knew where the video button was in my phone. She showed it to me the other day, asked me to talk, recorded my audio and video, and played it back as a demo for her idiot grandpa.
My son has recently acquired an i-phone, the look of which scares me. He tried to teach me how to use several of its apps but I resisted even touching it...for fear I may press a wrong button and make it explode into pieces like the alarm time piece that I opened one day when I was 17, and while exploring it, the main spring snapped and all its vitals lay scattered on the floor. I had to broom them all into a newspaper and get them back into one piece by the watch-repair guy, before my MD uncle got a scent of it.
Not so, Ishani. She constantly explores all the apps on her dad's phone and the other day she brought it to me and asked me to watch. There was this picture of a cat on the screen and Ishani scratched its legs and it started purring and Ishani's joy knew no bounds.
I am sure she will soon have her own e-mail id, blogspot, Facebook account and Twitter with or without the permission of her parents and grandparents. She has already mastered how to spell 'Tu Ti Tu' in Google and watch the fun on my laptop. And she can spell 'Kittoo' (Supratim's infant son) on the Search button of my Yahoo account and look for the mails with attachments and click on them to watch Kittoo's photos and enjoy.
And I am sure all her classmates in the LKG of Lily School are equally adept at all these things.
And Einstein had the temerity or unwisdom (in RKN's lingo) to call Ishani an 'idiot'! As her doting grandpa I think Ishani is one of the smartest kids I ever saw, and I would have loved to have her sitting in the front row of my classes at IIT KGP...she would have asked a few questions on Quantum Mechanics that would have bowled me for my good.
Well, Einstein never did any worthwhile physics after his 30s and never ever taught much. And Feynman was mortally scared of becoming another Einstein:
"...I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I'm making some contribution"--it's just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or
depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas.
And nothing happens. Still no ideas come..."
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
My Shakespeare Uncle never learned riding a pushbike although he was master of swimming...the village in which he grew up had streams and ponds but no high-tech gadgets like pushbikes in the 1900s. And when he found that I was surreptitiously learning to ride a borrowed bike using half-pedal technology, he was so scared that I would fall and break my neck that he complained about me to his mom...he was 60 then and she was 75...
And my Father, who learned biking (but no swimming) when he was 12, laughed when I told him the fears of his eldest brother. But when he was 70 and visited us at KGP, I tried to coax him to drive my Chetak scooter. And he declined not very politely...and he was the one who taught us at school all about the carburetor and 4-stroke IC Engines with figures of its four strokes...intake, compression, power and exhaust...
My son bought his own car, Tata Indigo CLS, 3 years ago. And we are perhaps the only family in our gated community who have a double-car-park @ Rs 2.5 lakhs. And my son tried to needle and wheedle me to try his sedan several times but I declined. With great difficulty I learned to sit in his front seat, and zoom in and out, and adjust the angle of repose, raise and drop the windows when he gives its controls...and master the child lock in the rear.
A couple of days back he left, along with his wife and child, to Kerala on his Thanksgiving holiday week. And, from Coimbatore on the way, he phoned me to pick up the key bunch of his car from its hiding place, go down, press the right button on its remote, push in the ignition key, and start the engine daily for ten minutes without fail...with the gear in the neutral and parking brake pulled up.
I resented it but had to obey...he would be sore if the battery went down and his car refused to start when he returned. And I followed his detailed instructions gingerly and scrupulously but nothing happened...the engine refused to start. And I got worried that I may have goofed somewhere irrevocably and was in for it. And I rang him up at once and asked him if there is some trick he concealed from me. And he laughed and asked:
"Did you press the clutch pedal?"
"No! But why? I never press the clutch pedal of my Maruti jalopy when I start it!"
"Ha! Ha! That's why your car sometime starts and stops with a jerk when you forget to come to the neutral...my Indigo has this safety feature...hey hey hey!"
When my son and I were waiting for my first cataract surgery six months ago at the Vasan Eye Care here, there was this Punjabi old gent retired from the Merchant Navy who was sitting beside his wife waiting for her cataract surgery. And we got talking shop. And the old man said that his son couldn't come that day since he was on his duty...the chap was flying his Indigo to Calcutta. And that he would come tomorrow for the after-care check up. And I was thrilled that I would be meeting an airline pilot!
The chap came the next day in his check shirt. And he looked and he was in his early 20s. And I was shocked...because I took that exact flight with my wife to Calcutta 4 years back. And I was placing our lives in the hands of such a young bird!
No wonder that sometime ago there was a terrific row when a pilot of Air India called his air-hostess: "Auntie!":
Air India has decided that it's the matronly air hostesses that are its Achilles' heel and is demanding a makeover. The snappy aunties will be replaced by younger (err... that's what Air India thinks 45-year-olds are) and better-dressed attendants. This has drawn praise from those who've faced the ire of a stern Air India stewardess in the past, and flak from most, considering that Air India has never really been, well, subtle before either. Remember when they openly fired air-hostesses for being too fat? Can hostesses be behind an airline's failure?
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