After my Dad passed away a few years back, Mom was left all alone with the responsibility of taking care of my Grandparents.  Both were in their nineties and my Mom herself in her sixties.  All the burdens of running the house came upon her shoulders.         For all her life, Mom had been a happy devoted housewife but with all her three children married and away from her, living in different cities, her world seemed empty and bare, now, that Dad was gone. The loneliness took its toll on her.  She lost all her will to survive falling into frequent bouts of sorrow and depression.           Seeing her condition, my sister introduced her to chatting on the Internet. A computer was a very complex machine for my Mom.  She came from a Gujarati educational background.  English was a subject she learnt while making us study in our school days.  So she knew it only at a basic reading level.  Writing and typing text was something quite different. With great patience and effort she learnt it slowly.  Her broken English or miss-spelt words did not seem to matter to those she spoke to online. She had a beautiful voice.  Singing was her passion and she joined the online groups of people with similar interests in music.  For my Mom, it was a whole new world which opened up to her.  A world where everyone was one, sharing the love for music in common. No caste, creed, color, age, place or sex mattered.  She found happiness in sharing with an infinite number of friends who respected her, loved her voice when she sang, enjoyed her company and in turn took away her loneliness and sorrow.           The real world was a place where there was nothing left for her to do.  Her life partner was gone, her children were busy with their own lives, her friends with theirs, she didn’t have any formal education, and she could not go out and get a job to keep herself busy with the constraints of responsibilities of the house and health problems related to age. The computer gave her access to new friendships, opportunities and most of all it made her happy again.          People have varied opinions on the positive or negative effects of the computer and the internet. Children are introduced to them in their early school years and it becomes a part of their education like any other subject. We, their parent generation learnt it in our college years.  Often we see our children know more than us!  However, what about our parents?  To  them  a  computer  and  the  internet  are  just  something  they  stand  beside  us  and  observe.           In  an  age  where  every  part  of  life  is  getting  computerized  do  we  ever  stop  to  think  how  alien  it  must  feel  to  them?  The fact that they need not go to the bank to check their account balance, or that they do not need to go to the railway station to buy a ticket, or that they need not travel hundreds of miles to see their dear ones!  Is it  not  our  responsibility  to  teach  them,  our  parents,  as  they  have  taught  us,  their  children  and  as  we,  teach  our  children?  Do  we  expect  to  move  ahead  in  the  future  when  our  parents  live  in  the  past?  When  they  have  held  our  hands  and  led  us  into   the  future?            At a stage, where health problems would make communication difficult; where retirement would leave them confined to the house; where everyone else would seem busy in their own lives our parents would become more and more dependant on us and out of touch with the outside world.  Let us give them the world at their feet.           A computer is a window to the world.  Let us install this window in our homes and open  it  up for our parents, so that they may enter into a whole new world of information and  experiences  and  that  they  may  be  happy.