My uncle Gadget arrived late last night or rather early this morning as he stopped at the airport for a leisurely coffee and a cigarette. He is here for two days en route to Australia and leaves tomorrow night.
Uncle Gadget is the man who gave me my first computer when I was eight years old and taught me the basics of, well, Basic, using DOS and so on. He gave me a box of 5.5″ floppies with all the software then available in Karachi and let me loose on it. The first computer mouse I ever used was attached to his computer. Visiting his house I would read his copies of PC Magazine and Byte. Although I think he would have liked me to become a computer scientist of some sort, he is at least the reason I was a digital native despite having a decade on the oldest people commonly considered considered as such. Though I am certainly not a social media native, nor a mobile device native, that perhaps is the real generational distinction.
At any rate, when last seen, Uncle Gadget was maknig a pizza oven and cooking up industrial cheese in my grandmother’s microwave. He has had a tumultuous life and there is much to respect in his curiosity, handiness and interest in how things work. A shame his bringing up drove him towards business rather than the engineering work that he might have enjoyed best.