Doesn’t it make you wince when you watch an old flick and think, “Man, he used to look like that? And now he looks like this?”

It’s bad enough to watch relatives age, but seeing it happen to impregnable famous athletes and movie stars is more sudden dispiriting. Yes, yes, looks are superficial and all that, but what about brains? Until I saw Judge Guido Calabrese majestically and literally hold court in the Second Circuit, I was having trouble wrapping my head around the older and wiser concept.

Then you’ve got health issues, oh man, the health issues. It’s pretty easy to picture that part of the journey.

Long gone are the days when I would knock myself unconscious diving into a brick wall playing Chinese handball. Recently I pulled a muscle while I was sleeping. Tough times indeed. Nobody ever is what he used to be. But now there’s a new cause for agingaphobia, and it has to with Sergei Brin, Steve Jobs and all the other techno mad men.

Watching a sexagenarian open an attachment is painfully unfair. They worked all their lives to get this far, and now they can’t even open the modern envelope. I gasp- that could be me one day. After all, I declared boldly in 1998 that email would never take off. I was the last guy to get a cell phone, preferring to memorize numbers in my head or scrawl them on my hand as I marched into the night with quarters in my back pocket. I didn’t send a text message till 2006, and learned how to upload pictures what seems like yesterday.

As we get older and stop making sense, our children and grandchildren will play with toys that seem like magic, and young associates will roll their eyes every time we say, “the what?” or “how/where?”

Every step you fall behind now is two you’ll have to make up later.

Lyndon Johnson knew this- that’s why the Great Society begat Head Start. Every runner knows this- that’s why you’ve gotta work the hills. The internet is no information highway, my friends, it’s a raging river, and all boats are sinkable. My new year’s resolution is to keep my head above water, fear of technology trumped by fear of falling too far behind to enjoy the future milk and honey years.

A reporter talks on her cell phone outside the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower on November 27, 2008, hours after the terrorists struck. By Arko Datta/Reuters/Landov.

November 26th would mark the one year anniversary of the carnage in Mumbai, when armed gunmen from Pakistan rampaged through the city by the sea indiscriminately shooting innocent people and taking two five-star hotels hostage.

There was so much that was gruesome about that attack. The sheer brazenness, for one. The fact that someone could just hop off  a boat and start shooting into the crowds.

Then, there was the media coverage – with the Western outlets focusing on the attack as targeting Americans and Britishers and the Indian media falling all over each other, trying to outscoop each other; revealing sensitive information and hampering rescue efforts as they dragged on over 60 hours.

In the end, 117 people were killed in the attacks. Died before their time, because some doped-up, impoverished extremist from a remote valley believed that this would, in some way, be tantamount to achieving whatever it is that he set out to accomplish.

PBS is due to broadcast Secrets of the dead: Mumbai Massacre – a documentary based on the testimonies of those who survived the attacks. It is due to air November 25th.  Check your local listings.  If you don’t live in the United States, you can always catch the documentary a day after its broadcast on the PBS website.

“This film offers an unprecedented, inside view into the attacks,” says Jared Lipworth, executive producer of Secrets of the Dead. “It not only reveals how the victims and terrorists acted during the massacre, it highlights how consumer technologies and social media gave the victims a chance to survive, while also putting them directly into the line-of-fire of the terrorists who were hunting them down.”

The film, made by Australian Elizabeth Pitt, is heart wrenching.

Watching it made me relive the anger and horror I experienced as I watched hour after hour of the non-stop TV coverage of the attacks. I remember being glued to the TV set, ranting on Facebook, G-chatting with friends back home, and checking Twitter for updates. It’s also amazing to note technology’s role in this attacks. From the Perpetrator’s side – there was the use of cell phones, satellite phones, GPS systems and on the Victim’s side – it was text messages from cell phones, blackberries, and I-phones. Nowhere before, have the predators and prey been so wired. It’s chilling to think of how information was used as a weapon and as a means of escape in this incident.

I am not sure what lessons India learned after this attack. But a hat tip to the crazy chaotic nation for not going to war with Pakistan, despite its security being blatantly breached by its rogue neighbor.

For more, read Marie Brenner’s “Anatomy of a Siege” in Vanity Fair (a piece that focussed only on the Taj and its survivors, prompting  author Mira Kamdar to quip “It’s almost as if Ratan Tata commisioned this piece.)