Montage-Part 4

I got on the internet much later than my friends, most of whom seemed to have unfettered access to a personal computer by their teenage years. Their only competition were their older brothers or sisters, but not their fathers. Appa definitely seemed unique in that he had a job in computing whereas my friends’ dads were all doctors or hardware engineers or bankers. Nothing majorly computing-adjacent, from what I recall.

My middle school friends would burn their favourite music onto CDs for me, which was really how I learned they had computers at home with capabilities I hadn’t seen on our Nigerian one¹. In the year before my trip to America, the multiplayer LAN gaming subculture was also emerging in Bangalore and these same friends—now in high school—would gather in cybercafésA more glamorously sci-fi sounding name for an internet café. to play Age of MythologyCounter Strike and World of Warcraft would become the hit games much later, I think..

Amma never allowed me to join them because at no point had my parents considered a system of giving us ‘pocket money’, despite my repeated pleading they do so. My friends somehow seemed to have a good stash of cash saved up to enjoy these experiences. Maybe their parents were not just wealthier but in some way savvier. Not only did it seem like they weren’t worried about their kids watching porn but it felt like they had a modern parenting approach that felt the pulse of the youths’ interests. I think my parents were probably worried about my exposure to such things, and perhaps keeping me in the darkness was more effective than figuring out a constructive system for exposure to the internet. Or maybe they felt the internet environment was just too unsafe and that they were protecting me from potentially harmful things by preventing me from going anywhere near it. But the real answer in my mind is that they were just old-fashioned. My theory here is that all the bouncing between countries and cities prevented them from having a strong friend group at their age. If they did, they might have coordinated their actions with other parents better.

So, when I asked for money to join my friends for these gaming sessions, all I’d get was a cold stare from AmmaRemember I said she ran a tight ship?, instead.

After dropping Amma off in America and with a year’s head start on the freshman 15, I came back to Bangalore to now live with my grandma.

She ran a more liberal ship so I didn’t have to justify my request for moneyI don’t know why Amma never trusted me in the same way because, in so many ways, I really was a model child, especially compared to my friends.. Under my grandma’s generosity, I snuck into a cybercafé near home a couple times a month. The money, however, wasn’t enough for me to join my friends at the posher venues for their gaming sessions. But I could at least talk to them on Orkut, a social network that was a bit of a craze amongst my friendsIn writing this, I learned that Orkut was bought by Google and turned into Google Plus.. Of course, there was also the general idea that I would go to university in America and the internet was supposed to help me figure something out on that front. What that was I never found out.

By the time the SATsScores on this Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) are how colleges determine if you’re a fit for their programs. rolled around, I was very smitten with a girl in college who did not know of my existence; she was just someone I’d walked past in the scooter parking lot on our way to class. So, in the middle of my SAT test, I remember a moment of decisiveness that I must do something about my smittennessIn another life, this might be worth more than a footnote. We’d ended up dating for a long time but eventually things just came to a halt.. I stopped writing the exam, leaving the hall with a determination to figure out how to solve this more pressing problem instead.

I managed to solve this problem and decided to attend university in Bangalore, prioritising my New Romantic Life. I don’t remember Amma and Appa putting up much resistance to my decision—on the one side, things were going quite smoothly in Bangalore for me (academically and otherwise) so that was not a concern. But I imagine there was also some understandable relief that we’d get the benefits of low-cost education. My four-year Indian degree would end up costing $500—in total!—back then. I suspect a comparable degree in America might have been between 250-500 times that.

This is not to say that the quality of education was comparableBut it was also not 200 times worse than America, I’d like to think.. It wasn’t. But this had mostly to do with the resources that most Indian universities—barring elite ones like the IITs—offered.

For one, computers were a novelty; I suspect in my engineering-focused university, we might have had a 100:1 ratio of students-to-computer. We’d often queue for an hourI suppose I could thank the American consulate for honing my patience muscle. to get access to a computer for 15-20 minutes tops.

The student population was predominantly from rural agriculture backgrounds who were probably first to go to university from their families; this also meant that personal computer ownership was uncommon in my cohort. This was a very different make-up of humans to the ones I’d been with prior to this; the wealth disparity was so much more palpable now as was the class divide. English was not the common language around me anymore; Kannada was.

Our computer programming lessons at university were also a misnomer. We’d get lectured about different aspects of C (but never C++) in the classroom. We were expected to memorise programs/debug them on paperI guess this pre-empted Google’s whiteboard interview system. before we even got near a computer. And even that access would be in groups of two or three students for five hours or so in a semester. Then, when the exams rolled around, we were expected to miraculously be comfortable around a computer. Needless to say, zero programming was learned by almost any of us. But I’d understand that only after I started grad school at Davis, where every class in the mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate program required a strong grasp of computing.