“Blackout”

Middle for editorial page in The Tribune

It was just another regular sunny day. All the men in my area were ready for their work, all the ladies were running against time to “pack” and “pack well” for their husbands and kids, and not so happily the kids were pushing themselves to their schools. It was just the way I start my day looking at this race for life. I was out of my bed and even before my morning tea, I wanted to see it once, to hear its sound, to touch it so as to feel alive, but this time there was something unusual about its behaviour. It was not responding in the bright and contrasting manner like earlier.
I was scared if my black and white nightmare of “losing a friend” was going to come true again this time.
For once I wanted my sixth sense to be wrong, wanted the love-hate relationship that I have with luck to be by my side. But like always everything that I feared came true and my life came to a standstill again. I didn’t know what to do, and felt so helpless when my best buddy stopped showing. Suddenly my best friend left me in the lurch and vanished. For me the road to life had no “right turn” and I felt shattered when the only “livewire”, the only hope, the ultimate crazy thing ever happened to me. My “laptop”, my dearest possession, crashed and believe it or not I didn’t know how to move on in life without its support.
Strange as it may sound to several others, but in times like today when everything is so “Chinese”, when “trust” in relationships is fading away and when everyone seems to be humming the same song “Everything I do, I do it for me”, I lost the only reliable thing I could count upon anytime, anywhere both in my highs and lows.
The most trendy, workable, best package and practical love I could ever imagine was my “lappie” and trust me my life “rocked” with my notebook and Internet together. Life was more like an open facebook. Sitting in front of the “Google guru”, the world was my oyster and made me confident of knowing almost everything. After a long time impossible for me was “I-Am-Possible”, but damn “Yeh zindagi” just when something good happens and exactly when you start thinking that you are living in a “perfect world”, the darkness clouds your happiness. Now, I feel life was a lot better when it was simple and not so high-tech, relationships were more real and honesty did pay back. At least, there was some “whiteness” in those black days!