After a considerable number of years of running the risk of being called an Amish, I finally gave in and bought an Apple Watch. I am not entirely sure why.

I was in the store to buy an iPad for Sharmila and a laptop for Nikita. But I came back with an Apple Watch. For the curious, I did buy their stuff too – even I am aware how to keep peace at home. That awareness, admittedly, has grown over an intense period of trial-and-error, if you know what I mean.

Coming back to the watch, in the last few days, my life has dramatically changed. The most noticeable change is what happens to me when I receive a call on my iPhone. It used to be that every call would be followed by me screaming around “Where are my Airpods? WHERE ARE MY AIRPODS”. (I had to scream louder the second time since, more often than not, they were still in my ears). But now, I inexplicably keep yelling at the watch. And it works. But I am a sight holding my wrist up and talking at it.

In the store, I had a flashback of my last annual physicals and I believe I convinced myself that I need to track my health statistics to stay … well, healthy, I guess?

So, this Apple Watch of mine ostensibly tracks how many steps I take. And I have to reach 10,000! None of your “small step for you, giant leap for mankind” bullcrap.

Guess what? I am now fixated on that statistic. There is an extra weight in my gait. Instead of treading lightly – or at least, normally – I am stomping all over the place. I am morbidly afraid that the watch might not pick up a step here or a step there.

I am even sweating over whether I should move my watch from the left wrist to the right wrist. Maybe, being a right hander, the watch will be more sensitive to movements from there. Interestingly, there is also a helpful app on the watch to detect stress level. That seems to go up every time I worry about counting footsteps.

Of course now I am confused, on the whole whether I coming out ahead or behind.

Oh! Did I tell you about that sleep app? Reading up on the stress app, I found out that I need good sleep to reduce stress. You guessed it – there is an app for that!! So, every morning, instead of brushing my teeth first, I am lost in analyzing my sleep and all the times I apparently tossed and turned.

Between you and me, those have gone up dramatically ever since Sharmila came back from India. Undoubtedly, I am merely reflecting on the correlation without even remotely suggesting any causality.

Here is the funny part. Every morning, I wake up with a good and cheery mood like every single day in the past. But now, I realize from my watch that apparently I did not have a good sleep. Looks like I tossed and turned. And something about REM that was not very REM-like. Suddenly I feel so tired and exhausted!

I think I have this cause and effect thing mixed up. Sure enough, the stress app starts doing its antics when I realize this!

Being a technology neophyte, I have to admit that the allure of that brilliant screen and all those small colorful things trying to tell me something is intoxicating to me. They have all these apps I can put on the screen. They are called “Complications” – score one for Apple for telling the truth. Apart from being technologically challenged, I am not the one with any nose for aesthetics. If you leave it to me, I will jam in all those small icons in a neat column and row arrangement 🙂

Right now I have put so many stuff on the screen that it resembles more like the interior of a cockpit. I am fairly sure a couple of Complications more and I can land a rocket in Mars from my new watch. And I am constantly thinking about “What else should I be interested in that I can put on the screen?”. It harkens back to my TV watching days when I used to be too busy flipping channels constantly to really watch anything. It was like while the whole world was wondering what was on TV, I was preoccupied with “What else is on TV?”.

One final observation. I love how the watch detects that I am trying to look at it. I learnt that the accelerometers (I have no clue what they are – but I am sure they are very smart. Is this that Artificial Intelligence everybody has been talking about?) detects how I am moving my wrist to face my eyes and stop there – and bingo! that means I am trying to read my watch. Once I learnt about it, of course, it became an incessant battle between artificial intelligence and (allegedly) natural intelligence. I am constantly trying to fool it. I have tried slowly moving my wrist (it still detected), moving my wrist around a few times like a wand and then stop (it won), looking at it askance (it still won) and what not. I once even tried doing it while keeping my eyes closed. I am not totally sure who won on that one.

For all that, I will tell you what has not changed. Every time I need to check the time, I am still reaching out for my iPhone and checking it there !!!