Tell us about your College Life.

It was awful. Seriously though, I now think that I wasted too much of my time and energy worrying about things like exams and college. When I recently went back to college for my convocation, I told my HOD that the only useful time I had spent in college was the time I had bunked and stayed at home.

If you’re a geek or a creative person, I would urge you - spend time on what you’re good at and what you like doing. Spend time drawing or writing or coding. Don’t spoil your health too much by killing yourself for your exams

When you reach 12th standard and all throughout college, people will always tell you “This is the most important exam of your life”. That is nonsense - no one at Microsoft has ever asked me how much marks I have got

What matters is what I did in my spare time in school and college. I liked to play around on my computer - and that’s what has helped me

I spent a lot of time learning subjects I hated and that were useless to me. School was better in that there wasn’t the pressure we had in college (except for 10th and 12th public exams). The best part about school was the culturals I attended. I got over my fear of the public, of strangers. The public speaking I did then helps me till this date.

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself before the 10th exams “Don’t worry about it - no one will ask you about this even 2 months from now”

I would tell myself before the 12th exams “Don’t kill yourself. Don’t spoil your health. It’s not worth it. No one cares”

I would tell myself “Spend more time having fun. Go play more. Spend more time on your computer. Spend more time dreaming. Spend more time idling away time. Spend more time reading good books (not related to studies)

Spend more time discovering yourself.

And finally, spend more time not growing up.

What first hooked you on to computers?

This is quite an interesting story. Until 12th standard or so (sometime in 1999), I had never touched or used a computer apart from a few DOS commands we used to learn by rote for our exams. I had wanted to be a writer or get into graphics and animation.

My life changed one day in 12th grade when my Computer Science teacher summoned me during a lunch break. It turned out that there was an unknown institute (called Comp-U-Learn) that was doing a free, promotional “Introduction to Computers” course. Guessing that it couldn’t hurt (and it was free after all), I trotted happily to this computer institute where we learnt things like how to create a folder, how to draw in Paint and so on.

One incident there changed me forever. One particular class, we were being taught how to copy-paste and the instructor happened to say ‘Please right-click on the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop’. Puzzled, I shot up my hand and eagerly asked ‘Sir, where is the desktop?’

Everyone in the class, including the instructor, burst out laughing.

I was hurt. In an almost cinematic fashion, I vowed to myself then that no one would ever laugh at me regarding computers again.

The ‘course’ was for 15 days and the institute wanted students to sign up for an additional 30 day course on C/C++.

I was the only student who signed up for the additional course. Since I was the only guy around, the bunched me with a bunch of older people who were studying Java and I got introduced to wonders like ‘import java.awt.*” and so on.

I finished 12th standard and the day after my TNPCEE engineering entrance exams, my dad bought me a computer. It was a P3, 850 MHz machine with an astounding 256 MB of RAM.

I was hooked throughout the holidays. I spent the entire holidays writing code in VB6 and have been coding ever since…

Why do I love computers so much? I’m really not sure. I think it has something to do with the sense of creating something, molding something from nothingness into a work of beauty. I tell my non-programmer friends that one of the greatest pleasures of life is seeing something finally work correctly, to track down that last pesky bug.

# Saturday, December 09, 2006 1:02 AM