Nephew Nightmare!!!

They are nice brats; it’s just that you are sapped of all your confidence after meeting them and they continue giving you sleepless nights. One guy barely 12 is the one who made my life miserable. As I cranked my laptop to check some official mails during my recent vacation, I was pounded by questions like, why is your laptop so slow to boot up. What processor do you have on it? Do you want me to rev it up a little? Why do you have a XP theme when you have Windows 7? All these came in a barrage of less than 60 Secs. I simply tell him that I don’t have answers to any of his questions.

The elder one passes by and the lil fellow proudly briefs him on how ignorant I am, the elder one takes one look at my phone and now it’s his turn to add salt to the wound. He flips through my phone and in a fraction of time to what his younger brother took, starts pounding me with..Uppapa (uncle) do you know what Joikuspot is? I give him one of those sick, Mr Bean looks!!! The only solace is that he is old enough to figure out I have no clue and goes on to explain that it’s an app where your phone can be used as a wi-fi server / router onto which other devices can hook on. I simply nod timidly in agreement. He continues do you ‘atleast’ know what Shazam does? By this time, I’m desperately looking for my brother who happens to be their father to rescue me. He goes on to explain that when you hear a song you don’t know, it helps you identify it and tag it. An app I thought I always wanted but never knew I was carrying it all along.

I call both the guys aside in an effort to salvage some pride, explain to them that I was never electronically inclined and I’m proud to call myself a hard core mechanical engineer and that I’m more a man of real machines and so on and so forth. Little did I know that I was digging my own grave. The younger guy again all of 12, who gave me a crash course on laptops, gives me a vicious smile this time and asks if I knew what the max torque of a Lamborghini Diablo was and goes on to explain the features of a Yamaha R6, thinking that a retard like me might at least know about a 2 wheeler. Torque was the only word that made sense to me, the machine man. I don’t remember the next five questions on cars and bikes that came my way. All I knew was that I needed a stiff drink to continue listening to, not answering the stuff these guys were throwing at me. They made me feel primitive, prehistoric and mentally challenged all at the same time.

Seeing that my face saving efforts have crash landed I pick the younger guy and tell him that he needs to really know outdoor sports and not be a gaming / internet buff. He gave those you-had-it-mate look and asked me what sport I played as a kid. I proudly told him what every other Indian kid would… Cricket. He started his rapid fire once again…do you know how to bowl the carom ball, top spin, doosra, flipper, china man et al and went on to hand me a bat and asked me to face him while he started demonstrating each of those. All I could tell him was, what R. Ashwin recently said, there are only 2 balls a spinner bowls, one that comes into the batsman and the other that leaves him.

After all this, can you believe it, I still had the cheek to tell him that the only sport that Indian kids knew was cricket…All I can remember is a larger ball whizzing past my nose. He gave me one of those looks which I was familiar by now and said he was just practising a ‘slam dunk’....Slam what??? was my expression but I just told myself to move on in life and though I hadn’t heard it right, the message was loud and clear….at that point I was a ‘lame duck’.

Love the challenge (if I can call it that) the boys throw up each time I meet them…This time I’m seriously thinking of doing my homework before meeting them. I’ve just learnt what SV on Lambhorgini SV stands for…Just praying that Lamborghini doesn’t launch a new model before I meet them next!!! Love you guys!!!