There must be somebody who regrets the early death of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s short-lived replacement for its reliable Windows XP operating system. Not many people, though, to judge from user reviews, and certainly not me. My knowledge of computing could be written on half a postage stamp. I’ve no notion what a spreadsheet is, and no need to know: all I use my laptop for is the Internet, word-processing and email. I still use olde-worlde dial-up (is it even available in India?), not broadband. I don’t even know the computer geeks’ vocabulary, let alone what it means.

In sum, in these computer-literate days, I’m a dinosaur—no, let’s say an ichthyosaur, their swimming cousins, which must have known there were faster ways of getting around but just didn’t bother to evolve accordingly. And I’m falling further behind every day. Still, for my limited purposes, I’d made sense of dear old XP. It did what I asked it to, and it didn’t crash. Then my laptop was stolen. By then, Vista ruled, and, like a fool, I reckoned that such basic needs as mine could be met by its most basic version, and the next thieves would make that much less profit out of me. My new laptop was duly so equipped, complete with Microsoft Works for word-processing instead of Word.

A fool indeed. The thing offers me 191 different typefaces and 28 different colours, it can probably sing, dance and play baseball on ice. What it certainly does is vary, and what it doesn’t do is what I ask it for. Some days it offers me a connection to my service provider before even being asked. Other days it waits till I’ve asked it for the Net, and even then its response is variable. My wife has to go through a small (and quite different) litany of clicks before she is allowed onto the Net.

I start writing, and find that its default setting is illegibly small. I correct that and write. Trouble over? Well, guess. Having written, I want to simply Ctrl+C the result and transfer it to the body of a Yahoo email bound for Calcutta. No way; when I try, the screen, with a grin on its face, assures me that “the Internet has stopped working”, but “Windows is checking for a solution”, which turns out to mean “start again”. I go laboriously through a couple of extra hoops, and at last the job is done.

Well, maybe done. Because, quite often, as I am in mid-flow, the machine, without warning, delights in suddenly updating itself; with the latest 28-colour song-and-dance in Old Church Amharic typeface, I daresay, and very pretty I’m sure it would look. But actually I’d prefer the plain old black-and-white Times Roman that I’ve just spent three hours on and which has now vanished into cyberspace. And when all is re-done, and I want to save my text as a document, it offers me several formats but only works with one. No doubt one can cure all these ailments (and thank you, anyone who cares — in plain English — to tell me how), but why should it be the user that has to cure them? Isn’t that what Microsoft pays its armies of engineers to do before it puts junk on the market?

At this point you may be asking what on earth all this has to do with the English language. I’ll tell you, with an analogy. Let us suppose that one day back in the 15th century (yes, Works, unasked, wrote that th as two little superscript letters), Herr Johann Gutenberg, the Bill Gates of his time, had decided that boring old lead, which he used for the movable type he’d just invented, was out of date, and in future he’d use an amalgam of fool’s gold, mercury and face-powder.

Result: no more printing, no Renaissance, no western civilization, if you like. And no English language as we know it: no editions of Chaucer or Shakespeare or the great 1611 Bible or Shelley. Or Darwin. Or Arundhati Roy, for that matter.

Computers are to today’s language and literacy what lead type and paper were once. Sell them to innocents and fools like me, by all means. But, just because we are fools, don’t let genii-fools design them. And now for Windows 7....