I found myself in bewildered state on the pavements of Mount Road. Frantically searching for my house in a completely changed Chennai I discovered it at last. I went in and rung the bell. I was completely awed to find a robot opening it. Later I found out that its name was x4897 with a built in Intel Pentium 25 chip and also an AMD Marathon IV microprocessor. I went in and asked mother, 'Amma, where is the kolu?" Amma replied "Look here. Venkey, don't keep fooling around. You can find it online and for traditional folks I've kept it in pooja room."
I went into the net and was astonished to find the traditional rivals Microsoft and Yahoo competing with each other in their kolu sites www.micronavratri.com and www.yahooratri.com. Also I found amazon.com selling online toys for Kolus. Well, well Navaratri had become an International festival.
There was a site for Robots celebrating Navaratri and it was called roboratri.com. Here robots singing both traditional and pop welcomed the visitors.
Soon I found a huge kolu kept online in our home page. I discovered Amma and Appa talking to the guests using video conferencing facilities. I was simply spellbound by the speed of the net, which was about 32 gbps. So that is how I could see people talking to each other in real time. I found very few visitors to the real kolu.
"Venkey thoonginathu pothum" I found my two sisters yelling at me.
I was day dreaming after all.