Google Dads

Quite frankly, I first read the term ‘Google Kaur’ in a joke on Facebook. So all credit goes to that person for this. ‘Google Kaur’ was the name given by Santa to his wife because she would give 100 answers to any question in 0.09 seconds flat! Google Kaur. Funny that.

However, this joke reminded me of having a Google dad all my student life, and I used to proudly say to my friends, ‘because my dad says so’, irrespective of whether he was right or wrong. I don’t remember, though, when was the last time my daughter asked me a question whose answer was also ‘Googleable’, if I may use such a term. She, though, keeps asking me English grammar, which I remain perennially confused about; and difficult math equations. But she never asks me general knowledge questions, like who was the first President of independent India. Instead of hearing me fumble and mumble between Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and Dr. Rajendra Prasad (I always confuse between the two. You?), she’d prefer to Google it and save her own and my blushes. So, is Google the new dad for children? Who invented the airplane? Google it. When did the French revolution begin? Google it. What is the meaning of dysdiadochokinesia? Google it. These days children don’t use reference books, and certainly not dictionaries and thesauruses. Hardcover encyclopaedias are being sold in vain by door-to-door salesmen at throwaway prices. Why? Because of Google. Google is the new Omnipotent. When my daughter sits down to study, especially when she’s doing a school project, she’s surrounded by gadgets, and more gadgets- A laptop (for the reasons mentioned above), A phone (to chat up with friends in between), A calculator (to know how much is 2+2), An android device (for any of the previous reasons), A printer (for print-outs for the project), and of course a spaghetti of tangled wires all around- from laptop adaptors to phone chargers to printer wires to God knows what. Within such a mess she looks like a harried first-tier techie in some MNC rather than a 9^th grade student. And her dad isn’t allowed anywhere near all this. So I just sit a little away and pretend to read the newspaper, hoping against hope that someday I’ll have an answer that Google doesn’t, so that I too could become the Google dad that all children used to be so proud of, prior to the internet era.