Grandma Tales

It has been almost two years since the passing away of my grandmother. However, I cannot but reminiscence on her various peculiar characteristics. Of late, I have been reminded of her use of the phone. As I am doing some research on a topic along the same lines, I thought of just imagining how my grandmother would have used a smartphone. Now, my imagination can be a little far fetched at times and this is definitely one of those times. This is because my granny was very simple when it came to technological advancements. Anyway, getting back to the story; sorry imaginative life-event. For a long time, my granny had used the now almost defunct landline to contact distant people. However, some years ago we decided to buy her a phone. This would be useful for us and for her as she was one of those busy types (a trait I didn't quite inherit). She was constantly on the move when out of home and even when at home she never seemed to be at rest, constantly moving about searching for something to do.

When she first received the phone she had the difficulty of understanding its mobility. She would often leave the phone at home thinking it to work like the landline. Now her phone belonged to the early Nokia series where the keypad was three times bigger than the screen itself. Due to her aging eyesight, she would find it difficult to read a message or the contact of an incoming call. This became a little worrying as she would miss most of our calls. And so, my brothers and I decided to put in a ringtone on her phone. But, this too proved useless as she would either mistake it for the music on the radio or not hear it because of the traffic around her. Nevertheless, we were determined to teach my granny to use her phone. Whenever we visited her during our holidays, we would take short crash courses on how to use the phone and what are its features.

Going by her systematic, well-defined, and focussed way of doing things, she seemed to get a hang of it though she always got confused with the technical terms. So, we began teaching her using allegories. Gradually, she got the hang of it and was on the road to mastery. But, progress was stopped in its tracks when she was diagnosed with dementia. If it wasn't for that illness, I honestly feel that she would have mastered not only the keypad phones but would have gone on to learn and master the smartphone with its touch-screen features. That was how she eventually taught us how determination and will power helps overcome all challenges.