Grumbling. Ranting. Railing.

After that shamelessly soppy farewell to my laptop, here I am- writing the first post from a ‘new’ machine - ye olde desktop… my Common or Garden variety home PC.

And let me admit, when my laptop was taken away from me (rather forcibly, because in a last ditch effort I did pull out all stops to retain it - but to no avail), I did not foresee the ‘situation’ that was developing.

Let me begin my lamentations by describing my desktop first. It has an outsized monitor. I never thought adjusting to a monitor would take so much doing! Have you ever been stuck with front row seats at a cinema? Recall the experience. The disconcerting effect that the too-near and too-large screen has on you – you watch the film resignedly, but you just can’t shake off the feeling that the world is somehow totally out of proportion. That is exactly the effect that this monitor has on me.

Now imagine trying to adjust to this giant after years of gazing into the petite 12 inch screen of my old laptop.

Juxtapose this with an undersized keyboard. It is about 10 inches across, and feels more like a toy than the real thing. The feeling I get when I am trying to type anything meaningful on it is somewhat like trying to play raga bhairavi on a one-octave casio keyboard. L

And then there is the mouse – a supremely eccentric being, which rests more often than it works. Like a worker holding a grudge against the management, it just stops working, all of a sudden, right in the middle of a busy day. And when this happens, I have no alternative but to go out and beg, borrow or steal a mouse from somewhere before shutting all operations.

Want to hear more? The machine’s sound card does not work… so no music! And that for me, is a fatal blow.

Beginning to get an idea now? Anyway, this is not where my bemoanings end.

I obviously need a new laptop since I intend traveling a great deal in times to come. And it has to be a tablet because I want to keep up my attempts at sketching and cartooning. And what do I find? That tablet PCs have vanished from the Indian market. You either have to choose ipad type devices, or regular laptops – the beautiful thing that was a marriage between the two - my old machine, a lightweight tablet PC, seems to exist only in foreign shores and my daydreams right now.

So, you see, at the present moment, finding a laptop of my choice seems an even more unlikely event than my going and dancing at Ramdev’s dharna.

So, mera toh chakka jam - pahiya poori tarah se keechad mein phans gaya … ideas, suggestions and even bhashans welcome on how to pull the wheel out of the mud and get going again…