Pristine

Pristine.

It's funny how one likes to believe that his entire life has been etched, planned, mathematically calculated to the seventh decimal and that every decision of his is a standing example of human reason and analytical prowess. And it's also funny how the most important decisions are made with the least amount of thought. Blink. And your life just changed.

Pristine. That's her name.

Where do I begin? What do I say? As much as I would like to tell you that I met her in an accident and fell in love with her at first sight, I am afraid that's far from the truth. I was introduced to her. She came home with a pair of funny photographers draped in a black suit. She settled in the corner, while the photographers raved about toothless urchins in bangalore roads and dew drops on fresh flowers. The bells didn't ring and the song didn't play even when one of them introduced me to her, as she stood there flashing her vital statistics.

But she's one of those who grow on you in the course of time. I got the contact numbers before she left; met her again in an hour and a half, pondered hard over a sumptuous lunch and made her mine at the stroke of two.

Pristine. That's her name. And she's mine.

Do I give you numbers? 1.5 with a zillion zeroes. 512 with a few zeroes more. 14. 42. Do you want me to translate poetry into bits and bytes? pixels perhaps - pick and put them together so that you can see her as she is in flesh and blood. No. she is beyond any form of expression. She has to be imagined, touched and felt, explored, heard and viewed in technicolor.

Pristine Fyodorvosky. That's her name and she's my laptop.

I am utopian. I am naive. I believe in free will and in the power of good. I believe in Santa Klaus and Superman. And I believe that I can lead my entire life using registered software or open source applications. Didn't I tell you I was naive? You can of course install Linux. But the installations might take a while. You will not get the required drivers. A lot of 'useful' applications are not available in Linux. So, I shy away. Spend three grand and a half on the operating system. Then you need the office software, the anti-virus and the works. And of course, what better lunch time jibe than morals and values. People love to twist the words, tweak the line and make up use cases to pull you down. It's not a comfortable feeling when someone talks against an evil that's accepted as a moral inconvenience. So, I am the moral open source guy. What songs do I listen to? Do I watch pirated movies? [I don't]

Well, Pristine's surviving and we are not alone - I just had to look. I am typing this post on AbiWord, an open source word processor. I have installed open office and am managing my accounts using Open office.org calc. I am looking for an open source anti virus software before I get my wireless internet connection done. Once that's done, the hope is that I get to blog more often now that I can do it sitting at home.

It's a tough world, I tell you. Good news is I am not complaining.