Even Before a Computer

It was 2019. I was in my sixth grade. The closest thing to a computer that I had full access to was my parents' phones. Yet, for some reason, I was already consuming content about game development using Unreal Engine 4. I did not understand much of what I was watching, but I kept going.

Fast forward to February 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic had brought the world to a standstill, and schools had moved their classes online. At home, there were three people who needed a device for education: my father, my younger brother and myself. There were only two devices — my father's phone and my mother's phone. I discussed the problem with my father, and we decided to buy a laptop. I made sure it had the bare minimum specifications required to run Unreal Engine 4. The first thing I did after getting it was install Unreal Engine 4. From seventh grade until the middle of ninth grade, I kept trying to build a game. I failed. Many times. The hunger to build games, however, never really left. I still plan to return to it, starting smaller this time.

I Didn't Know I was "Coding"

Computer Science had been a subject in my school since first grade. When I finally got a computer of my own in seventh grade, I also started learning QBASIC because it was part of our school textbook. Around the same time, I watched a beginner tutorial on the C programming language. The instructor built a simple calculator using two operands, an operator and a switch-case statement.

I did not know whether QBASIC had switch-case. What I did know was if-then-else. So I translated the idea into something I understood and wrote the calculator using it. And it worked.

It was a tiny program. The code would probably look trivial to me today. Back then, however, it changed the way I looked at computers. For the first time, I realised that I could take an idea I had seen somewhere, understand the underlying logic and make it work in my own environment. That small calculator was one of the first moments that made building things feel possible.

Sir Dhrubajit Adhikary, Assistant Teacher, Computer Science

Weird how one man can be an event in the life of another. I was in ninth grade when Sir Dhrubajit Adhikari joined our school as a Computer Science teacher. It was the first day of ninth grade, and he took the second period. I had never seen a teacher quite like him — extremely composed, professional and an outstanding teacher. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to pursue Computer Science in the future.

He taught us C in ninth grade. Based on what I learnt from him, I built a surface area and volume calculator: a clean, organised, menu-driven program with modular code. It was one of the first times that writing code felt less like solving an exercise and more like designing a system.

He left our school when I was in tenth grade. A year later, when I chose Computer Science for eleventh grade, I called him again and asked whether he could help me cover the eleventh and twelfth grade syllabus through tuition. He agreed. Over the next two years, he made me proficient in Python. During the early part of that period, he also enrolled in a PhD programme in Deep Learning.

Education: Before and After Isolation

I appeared for my CBSE Class 10 boards in 2024 and scored 91.2%. By then, I had spent ten years in the same school. After tenth grade, I decided to continue there for eleventh and twelfth grade. It was going to be the school's first-ever batch of Classes XI and XII. Somehow, it became even stranger than that: I was the only student in the class.

For two years, I was the first and only student representing my school in Classes XI and XII. I completed twelfth grade with 87.4% and eventually joined Scaler School of Technology in Bengaluru. I was selected for the interview rounds at Scaler through my JEE Main Mathematics score, which was 98 percentile.

During twelfth grade, I was also selected into The Knowledge Society twice in a row. I eventually chose not to enrol in their programme, but being selected twice remains an important part of that period of my life.

Beyond zeros and ones

Coding and technology are only one half of who I am. Outside of them, I have a few things that I can obsess over with equal dedication. Hans Zimmer's music has been a constant fascination of mine, and Christopher Nolan's films have influenced the way I look at storytelling and cinema. Batman has occupied a similar place in my imagination for years.

I also enjoy capturing scenes on a camera and spending long stretches of time cycling. There is something about observing, creating and moving that keeps pulling me away from a screen, only to eventually bring me back to it.