Vibha’s been having some trouble with her laptop lately. In fact, ever since she bought it. While not exactly a Luddite, Vibha is one of my least tech-savvy friends and the latest gadget has zero appeal to her. She prefers the tried and true and her trusty old (nine years!) Dell suited her just fine. Until the day it finally crashed for good and even her trusty old repairman gave up and advised her to get a new one.

For some reason, she decided to go for a MAC. The sleek design, the sexy ads, the keyboard that lit up – who knows? She got one.

But only a few weeks into what MAC faddists call “the other side,” the machine kept packing up. It would freeze, shut down unexpectedly, not turn on. She repeatedly lost data. Complaints to the service centre went nowhere as the thing always and perversely behaved beautifully with the technicians. They would return it to her with that pitying yet smug look geeks so often assume. Ten days later, the problems would start again.

After months of such backs and forths, they agreed to change the hard drive, but even then, it only lasted a few weeks. Finally, they gave in and said they would give her a whole new piece.

But that was only the beginning of the nightmare – tech support didn’t communicate with the courier company that was supposed to collect the old one and time after time, some guy would land up at her clinic hours after it had closed and multiple phone calls were required to sort the whole mess out.

Her clinic.

Vibha is a developmental pediatrician. She works with children with disability and she pours her heart and soul into what she does.

While all this MAC drama was unfolding, she had an encounter with a parent whose child was regressing. It was a child she had been taking care of for some time and the mother’s desperate neediness was draining for everyone at the clinic. This particular day, Vibha had stood in the observation room watching through the one-way glass while a therapist worked with the child. The mother sat off to one side, seemingly completely disengaged.

Watching more carefully, however, Vibha could see the panic and fear in the mother’s eyes.  The therapist was trying to get the little boy to put toys into a box and praising even his feeblest attempts to do so. The mother, she suddenly realized, was not disengaged at all. She was horrified. Her bright, able child was now struggling to do something he had been able to do with ease three long years earlier.

“I stood there watching this woman comprehend her loss and I thought about my own year-long experience of rage and resentment and feelings of unfairness about a stupid laptop. She was watching her child slip away from her in front of her eyes and I was feeling hard-done-by about a computer. Talk about perspective. Talk about getting a grip.”

Disability does that for us. It provides a stark and unflinching view of life on the edge (can’t walk, can’t speak, can’t take care of myself) and then shows us that life is still possible within such confines. Life is still graceful, still soaring, still a gift.

We stare it in the face and then we dare ourselves to worry about a laptop. Disability can set us free of the things we cannot let go of.