Wonder around what the lives of our ancestors of stone-age must have revolved! They must have been engrossed in locating more and more stones to carve better tools! “My tools are better than the neighbours”, the man of the family must have been gloating or the guys must have been proposing to the girls of their choice with best carved scrappers or even shining stone jewels!

Well, we have evolved we feel, times have changed from stones to computers. Now our lives are “compu-centric”. A kid needs computer to play games or to do his homework; mom needs a computer to learn about how to manage her pregnancy or how to handle tantrums thrown by her three year old kid. Gone are the days when the kids needed a grandma to spin yarns of stories for them or the experienced moms-in-laws shared their experiences with child bearing or handling several kids born by them.

Remember the good old movies, where the hero was seen trudging endlessly from office to office in search of a job and used to find a “No Vacancy” board everywhere. Or people made a bee-line for the government employment exchange to get them registered for a government job. Now it is a dot. com that gives you all the scope for a virtual search over the internet. The long queues at the Railway booking counters are getting shorter by the day; one need not stand in the endless queues to pay the phone and electricity bills and the like.

The fate of even the harried fathers seems to be changing now. Earlier the pundit or the broker laden with horoscopes frequented the houses where girls were coming of age. They had a complete list of bio-data with detailed information both about the grooms and the brides. A gentleman in Delhi revolutionised the concept and came up with a novel idea of a marriage bureau. Now there are a number of websites offering alliances. Marriages, it seems, are not made in the heavens these days; they are made via the computer.

The list is endless. Imagine what would have happened if our ancestors had not discovered stones as implements? Perhaps today you would have been reading this piece on a leaf or skin of a birch instead of the e-paper in your computer!