1 / 2Transition from School to College
I was 20 and doing my 3rd year in college. I had just upgraded to an all black computer with a Gigabyte motherboard with 2GB of RAM, a major upgrade from the first ever computer I had - an Intel Pentium which my dad got from work to do his work stuff some time around Y2K. He was a Telecommunication Engineer. I remember browsing the internet in IE5 in Windows 95, playing games like Prince of Persia and Roadrash, the sound of dial-up modem, CD-ROMs, Floppy disks and also how my heart raced when I watched adult stuff for the first time on popularscreensaver.com.
During my schooling years, I liked Physics, Maths, Biology, and English. I hated Chemistry and Computer Science. I was an average student. To get an Engineering seat, I had to do well in Physics, Chemistry and Maths, which I did. I got a good seat in one of the top colleges in the University of Kerala as an Electronics and Communication student. But the last 3 years in school (year 10, 11, 12) were so tough that by the time I reached college, I was fatigued and didn't have the energy to put the effort required for an Engineering degree. The first year into college in 2007, I was convinced it was not for me.
It was around that time I was getting addicted to creating things on the Web, a hobby I had picked up in school thanks to a trend that swept across the campus to make money through Google Adsense. While other kids my age got addicted to games, I got addicted to the Web. The computer used to break down every now and then and I used to rip open its internals trying to fix the hardware and the pirated windows software it ran on which required a lot of reading of computer stuff. Even though I hated Computer Science as a subject in school and college, the constant fixing indirectly forced me to read up about it. This went on throughout those 4 years of college. Its safe to say I was working full time for myself as a Web Developer and treating my studies as an afterthought.
This brought into conflict my father who had high expectations of me. He tried various ways to persuade me, sometimes even forced me to take my focus away from my Computer and on to books. He used to regularly lock the computer with a BIOS password and I used to just disable it by removing the CMOS battery, a trick which he himself taught me. Our conflicts intensified throughout the 4 year college period as I got more and more addicted to the web. So much that his attempts to make me study or socialise in real world went in vain.
The adulation I got by creating things on the web was like a drug to me. There weren't many people who did this back then. I went to college festivals across the state to easily win web development competitions and made good money. I started creating games in my college and running my own events. In 2010, I was asked to create the website for the RAICS International Conference which was held in my city at the time. I also ran Web Development classes to the Computer Science students. In 2011, I created a site where people could just enter their data and it would automatically create a personal portfolio, a resume, a job profile, a personal website and job recommendations. I called it vyakthitva (or individuality). This was before there was LinkedIn. I even created a team of people and went around the city partnering with colleges and companies. That was my first entrepreneurial attempt.
But, I didn't pursue it because neither did I believe in the idea fully, nor did I want to gamble away my career over a potential idea. Start ups in India were unheard of back then. A career in Web was shunned back then. Absolutely nobody had the appetite for risky ventures. So I was forced to choose to climb the career ladder the traditional way - by working my way up.
Today I sometimes wish I had the conviction to believe in that idea, stick to the plan, and take it all the way to completion. But I did not have the freedom to choose that path at the time. Going with the flow was the only option.