Memoirs of a Long-time Luddite

This is a memoir-style essay where I trace, to the best my memory can, my early years around the internet and computing. It combines five serialised posts for Inkhaven, which you can also read here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Finale.

My dad, Appa, bought his and, in some sense, my first personal computer when we lived in Lagos. This computer appeared in roughly 1995 or 1996, when I was likely no older than nine. I suppose I could clarify this fact with Appa, but even he might not remember this number too well—he would most likely just give a number with such confidence that I would doubt the number here.

I say “in some sense” because I have an older brother. This meant there was a pecking order of who got access to the computer; first Appa, then my brother, then me. Amma, my mom, well… Indian men, eh? I must have either idolised Appa and my brother. Or feared them. I suppose it was both because what is the difference, really. But this meant I never actually learned how to use a computer because I never got access to one until much later.

This story’s rooted in computers, but I realise that the part about Nigeria is just far more interesting so I’m going to digress.

In Nigeria, Appa managed the weaving section of a textile factory; on some nights, we’d join him on his supervision tasks which involved wandering the shop floor. His main task, as I understood it, was to ensure his section’s employees weren’t sleeping on the job. There was always one who was, and while I knew Appa’s anger could be uncontrollable, I wondered if his rage blinded him to the guns on the Nigerian labourers. They were ripped! But, I guess Appa was the boss in this setting, so there was some installed hierarchical respect that those under him had bought intoNow that I think of it, I wonder if this is how I learned to despise hierarchies and organised labour…?.

He wasn’t the only one who bossed the local Nigerians around—as a child, it seemed to me that was just how it was. I still remember the Nigerian locals on the shop floor referring to him as “Master”. I wondered what they called the owner of the company. Or if they’d ever seen the guy—and it’s always a guy.

This is all crazy, of course, but not just in retrospect; it always flummoxed me how the non-local population that I was a part of got away with this hierarchical organisation around people who were indigenous to the place. I still do not fully grasp what it is about a child’s compass of what is fair or right but it does exist. This felt wrong to me, even back then.

Of course, all of this was well before I learned about British colonisation of India—or Nigeria, for that matter. Had I known this, I suppose minorities bossing the indigenous majority around would not appear as unusual. But back then, it seemed odd, to say the least.

Appa worked at 4-5 companies in Lagos, over 6 or 7 yearsAs I write this, I am not even sure which year we moved there. The details have always felt hazy, even if the memories aren’t.. My recollection of the specific dates of our time in Nigeria remains vague; I was quite young when we moved there. We lived there long enough for it to feel like home when we left. But I also kinda knew that India was also home—I remember the town of Ankleshwar, where I was born, and early school years in Mumbai, as well. We’d also fly back to India every year—in business class!—as his company would buy tickets for all of us; this was standard for all employees. I guess it must have been hard to recruit people to work in Nigeria back then—maybe it still is…

We moved back to India in 1998 (I think) because Appa decided he needed to make some changes. I’ve overheard some of the more gossipy reasons for this as a child, so I can’t confirm their veracity.

The non-gossipy side is that he wanted to no longer be a textile engineer, at the age of 42 or 43; his hope was to move to the United States to live the American dream; the cars, the houses, the movies, the works. But this would require his re-skilling into software things so we moved from Lagos to Bangalore, which was taking center stage in the Indian tech scene but was also where he grew up; it was where two of his three brothers lived.

Moving there felt like a pretty severe upending in quality of life. For me, at least—I cannot speak for my brother or parents. For one, before my teenage years, I’d gotten very accustomed to living in air-conditioned homes and being chauffeured around in fancy cars—or maybe having someone driving you around makes even a modest Peugeot feel fancyAnother lamer and tamer version of The Selfless Driving Car.. If there were power cutsPower outage, but we’ll stick to the local lingo., we had backup generators, too. If there was a water shortage, large drums of water would be rolled into our house; I’d wondered what the local Nigerians from Appa’s factory felt bringing in several gallons for us when they would have also lacked water at their homes.

India, at that time, came with some of the same problems, but none of these solutions as we were no longer living that upper class lifestyle—I had become, basically, a brat over my time in Nigeria.

But we did move back with the computer from Lagos, too—Appa would need it for his training. It might have been the one object that separated us from the other middle-class families in the block of apartments we lived in.

Of course, my access to it remained limited because there was a pecking order—I seldom got to use the computer. If Appa wasn’t working on his stuff, my brother would be on it; in Nigeria, he would play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D or Commander Keen, while I mostly watched. Quake became the centre of his life in India. Of course, it was not like I played nothing at all—we had a Sega Game Gear and Gameboy. I did get to play on them, but on the one side, it was clear that the computer games were more immersive; but I suspect part of me also just wanted access to what I couldn’t have. So, I’d just spend a lot more time watching him play whatever he did on it.

In Appa’s usage, I kept hearing words like Oracle, SAP, and ABAP in conversation. On the computer screen, it was more numbers and text than immersive, cartoony animations of platform games or gore-filled panoply of first-person shooters. This seemed less fun so I never really watched him work on the computer. He’d also have a lot of big, spiral bound books lying around and reams of sheets to print on, all of which also seemed quite unappealing. Sometimes, I think that children have a wisdom that adults lose; a wisdom of prioritising fun over logic¹.

Eventually, things would work out for Appa’s side of the plan. After roughly three years shuttling between Hyderabad, for work, and Bangalore, to see us, he would move to the US in 2001. The plan was for us to follow him in a few days or weeks.

But that wouldn’t happen. We didn’t know at the time that we would have such a hard time following him there, but plans for our move were well under way before he left for the US.

It was thrust upon Amma to handle the logistics of selling the last bits of our stuff at home. Like the TV, fridge, our beds, and even the computer! After moving back from Nigeria, she’d been slowly trained into handling the personal finances of our home because, after his Bangalore-based training, Appa spent a good chunk of his time in Hyderabad for work. He’d come back to see us every few weeks but only for the weekend. He sent home money for Amma, to keep the show running in Bangalore.

That she had been married at eighteen and become a housewife probably made all this quite daunting for her; but she ran a real tight ship.

She was thriftier and more frugal than Appa, which I attribute to how her father raised her; he was an honest man but also very miserlyI’m sure there’s some correlation between the two.. I remember, even now, how she’d fill out a little dated journal with the finer details that accounted for all our expenses. She’d make sure my brother and I put in whatever we spent on grocery store runs or travel in there, as well. I remain uncertain of the value of this effort on me but I could see that every month, she’d be satisfied by seeing how much we’d spent in the past month.

If only she’d learned to use the computer for this. Back then, I didn’t question why she had never learned to use the computer but it would become clearer a decade later when I’d teach her how to use one. It required a lot of patience, which Appa lacked. At the time, my brother and I only really knew how to get a game running. But I’m sure we might have also been tactically reluctant to share the computer with one more person. Back then, I suspect neither of us really knew one could do serious math on it; I definitely thought things like that were either done mentally or on paper and was the whole reason school existed: to torture children with these ideas. Had I paid more attention to what Appa was doing on the computer, that might not have been the case. To this day, I am unsure if it was my lack of curiosity or just the pecking order that prevented me from learning how to use the computer. Or maybe it was some grand design by Appa to keep that knowledge from us so we’d be really good at math for the purpose of exams.

The Taliban would throw a serious spanner in the works for our planned migration to the US in 2001. Appa was supposed to fly to New York on 9/11 but obviously his flight was cancelled. While I only vaguely recollect the years of our moves between India and Nigeria, the memories of what transpired that day remain ripe. This stuck not just because it was a world event but because of how much it disrupted life for several years after. Maybe even permanently.

Amma tells me that on the day Appa was supposed to fly, our flat had been pretty much emptied. Amma, my brother, and I also had our visas to follow him a few weeks later—except for two mattresses, some pillows, and blankets. We had sold everything—the fridge, TV, and the beloved computer! We really did think it was a matter of days or weeks before we moved. I can only imagine that American visas were a mere formality to secure back then because I have never known getting an American visa to be anything short of a pain in all my living years.

Without a TV or a computer at home, we were probably among the last to learn of the events of the day. Looking down, from our first-floor flat’s window, we could see a small crowd gathering in the common garden area of our flat’s campus. Crowds were not unusual as we lived in a very social apartment complex, but the general commotion of the congregation had an unusual tension to it. We’d seen this energy when someone lost a family member so we headed down to see what was going on.

Once we got wind of what they were discussing, we gathered in Appa’s brother’s flat; my uncle lived five minutes away from us—with his wife, daughter, and Paati (my grandmother)—in a different building of the same complex. There, we watched the dramatic news footage of the planes flying into the twin towers and their fiery collapse.

Appa’s flight was, of course, cancelled but he’d eventually fly into the US a few days later.

It would be almost 2004 by the time Amma would join him there.

The details of those years are hazy for me but I remember that we would end up at the American consulate in Chennai over and over again. This went on for about three years before we’d have new visas again. Why we needed new visas remains unclear to me but Amma has tried explaining to me that it had to do with Appa’s company name being different to the one in our passports; I am not sure she fully understands it and I do not probe her because I see how emotional she gets talking about it.

Her voice turns angry and then shaky—even 20 years later—as she tells me of the many trips the three of us made to the consulate in Chennai. Doubts raised at the interview about whether my brother was really her son because he was “so much taller than her and looked nothing like her”. At eighteen, he was no longer a minor and given the general post-9/11 immigration climate, our new visa application was being scrutinised with intense skepticism. My brother eventually told Appa that he should be removed from any future application as it seemed clear that he was the bottleneck to Amma’s and my move.

So we tried this strategy. Amma and I would eventually have our visas granted but our applications were submitted separately. Reducing the multiple points of failure to a single one for each person.

Amma continues to tell me that her visa was secured under extreme duress. For someone who didn’t have a university degree, her immaculate English was being looked at with incredulity by the consulate workers interviewing her; they did not believe that she wouldn’t do what all other Indians like her do, after landing on American soil: work in a gas station once for extra money. This was something her spousal visa didn’t permit. Amma made clear that she understood the rules and didn’t wish to break them. She was pushed from one room to another for more questioning over a couple hours, which didn’t include the six hours of queuing outside the consulate, in Chennai’s sweltering heat (we had done this a lot more times than was humanely acceptable). She eventually had a nervous breakdown. Her tears became sufficient evidence for the interviewers to finally grant her a visa. This was likely around 2004.

I don’t remember much of how I eventually got my visa approved in the same year—Amma tells me I went to Chennai and did the whole interview on my own. While the queuing to enter the consulate was expectedly long, I don’t remember it being particularly hostile, unlike when the three of us went as a unit; I suppose being young but also looking it (unlike my brother) helped a bit.

Amma and I would eventually make the trip to see Appa in the summer of 2004; she would stay back with him while I got a summer vacation with them and saw a lot of the east coast of the US. I remember this being a very fun break—I think I gained over fifteen pounds in two months by gorging on an infinite number of pizzas every night while binge-watching FriendsI can’t tell anymore why I liked the show because I can barely stand it now..

We also travelled a lot! I remember visiting DC, where the National Air and Space Museum blew my mind; Boston, where I touched John Harvard’s shiny shoe without knowing much about Harvard University’s legacy²; New York City, where I remember eating one of the best slices of pizza, somewhere in the Empire State Building; and Orlando, where I remember riding the Incredible Hulk Coaster several times in my three days at the Universal Studios theme parkThis links to not having a computer, in my opinion. But maybe also just not having a means to consume any media at home for three years.. I remember the super-sized supermarkets with everything a teenager might want—junk food, comics, and gadgets—all under one roof. I was pretty sold on America by the time this vacation was done. The varieties of non-spiritual experiences made the idea of living there at some point very alluring. America definitely felt like the land of abundance.

I came back to Bangalore to finish my final year of pre-university schooling. The plan was to also take the SATs that year to then study at an American university. The SATs were paper-based back then so I don’t think I was on a computer to prepare for itI am still quite shocked at how bad my memory is about these things. But writing this is definitely helping a bit to work my way forward.. But I can vaguely recall that this is around the time I would start to get some minimal computer exposure at an internet cafe near home, with its dial-up connection; I think this may have been to look into university applications. Also, my brother was in Bombay at the time; we would speak over the phone back then, just like how I spoke to my parents, who were living in Connecticut. While I didn’t really use the internet much during this time, it marked the dawn of my internet era.

I got on the internet much later than my friends, most of whom had 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 one³. 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.

By the third year of undergradIndia has a four-year program for BE/BEng., I had decided I wasn’t going to sign up for the fresh graduate jobs that my friends were all interviewing for on campus. Back then, most Indian universities in engineering didn’t operate purely as centers of education that returns its graduates back to the wild; instead it is also a marketplace, where companies and third-year undergraduate students interact. Companies are allocated slots to come on campus for a couple days to run written exams on one day followed by in-person interviews on the next day—offers are usually made by the end of the day though some might take a couple weeks⁴.

The 9-5 grind was never going to work for me in India. I had eavesdropped on Appa’s and other adults’ quibbling about the hierarchical work cultures, where they often got shoved around and how much better America was, in comparison.

I had already been to America a couple times at this point. After my second year of university, I visited my parents, who had moved to Indianapolis; that summer, I’d gotten to spend some time on Appa’s laptop and also taught Amma to use a computer⁵. This was also probably the longest period of time I had spent with a computer in a home. At this point, Gmail and Skype were where I spent most of my time to talk to my friends and girlfriend. But, of course, the computer lost out to the PlayStation 3, which Appa surprised me with when I visited. It had been announced a few days or weeks before I landed in Indianapolis, so most days were spent playing Fifa online.

When I brought that PS3 back to India, I got my first wireless internet connection; this was 2007. I realised how differently the game performed on Indian connections, which just couldn’t keep up with the games’ demands. I suspect this might have been another determining factor, maybe even more important than my dislike for a 9-5 in India, that further biased me towards moving to the US.

As I still didn’t have a computer at home in India, I was still frequenting the cybercafés to get my internet fix⁶; GMail chat was how my brother and I stayed in touch. He was always on a computer in the IIT Bombay lab. I had no idea what that meant; I thought a lab was where you did physical experiments because that was all my university had under the guise of labs. The computers lived in the computer room.

When I told my brother, in one of our chats, that I wouldn’t be sitting for the placement interviews at university, he was supportive and sold me on the virtues of studying further. He had found a lot of intellectual satisfaction at IIT, where he was finally meeting teachers and students that were of a high caliber—he hadn’t regretted continuing on the education path. Both our undergrad universities were really make-shift by comparison—especially his, which was in the boonies of KarnatakaThe state whose capital is Bangalore.—you got out of these universities exactly what you put into it. The teachers weren’t equipped to really teach you and the general infrastructure was, well, non-existent.

He encouraged me to attempt the IIT entrance exams, like he had done, but also suggested thinking of moving to the US, which he was going to do. He had already decided to head to UC Davis⁷ for a PhD, after interviewing with several other American universities; listening to him helped me learn which American universities were good but also which were well out of my reach. The Harvard that I had once visited was definitely out of reach.

I knew my intellectual ceiling and clearing an IIT entrance exam was beyond that. I had heard that the GRE was not too different from the SAT. And it helped that he seemed a bit more biased towards my studying in the US. He pointed out the benefits of having the whole family in the same country after what would be eight years. He doused my uninformed skepticism, about the costs of university, with rationality; it could be easily paid-off once I got a job there. But the costs could be even lower if I went to Davis, where he was going, or near Denver, where my parents were soon moving to. This all sounded reasonable but I had the suspicion that it would be harder for me to get into a top American university as, unlike my brother, I was coming from a no-name Indian universityNo-name by international standards. and not a premier institute.

So, I sat for the GREs in my final year of undergrad. Unlike when I took my SATs, the GRE tests were computerised so this meant that I now spent even more time at the cybercafés without a fuss from anyone. Around this time, my brother became my adviser on all things US university applications from his lab in IIT; he was probably one of the first instantiations of a remote teacher in India I suspect. I still recall one of our exchanges—I think it was on Gmail—where he was shocked I didn’t know about Google and what it did; this was when he asked me to “Google how to apply to that university”. Through this, I became somewhat versed in the use of a computer when I was nearly 22. I remember realising just how badly I needed to have a computer at home—I even went so far as to get a Linux distribution, called YellowDog, running on the PS3 so I didn’t have to rely on the cybercafés. But the experience without a keyboard was sub-standard; I also learned then that a TV doesn’t work well as a monitor.

I’d initially considered going to Boulder, but decided against it. In 2009, I finally arrived in Davis, where my computational engineering education would really begin; something that never happened at my university in India.

Needless to say, I suffered a lot in my first quarter as I chose coursesHeck, being able to choose felt like such a privilege. We could never do that back home. You are what you were served. that required more programming than I had ever learned. My grades suffered so bad that I spent the next year evading every class with a large component of its grade dedicated to computing. Instead, I chose classes focused on theoretical understanding of topics and hand-written math; in some ways, I was shooting myself in the foot on the coding front but I think, in the long-term career of a researcher, this decision has served me well and made me a more rigorous thinker.

With classes out of the way, I’d eventually learn to code in the grad students’ computer lab. I had the luxury of time to focus on doing so for my PhD research—if I hit a wall, I would research my way out of it; sometimes, I’d even do 50 continuous hours in the lab to make sure I left with a result. 10 Starbucks grande lattes can stave off sleep in a grad student.

In the third year of my PhD, I finally bought a laptop with the little money I had saved up from teachingI was already reliant on Appa for some financial support so didn’t want to burden him with the request for a computer. and spent lesser time in the grad student lab. I spent more time around other programmers with a mechanical engineering bent, who taught me so much more than I would learn sitting in a lab on my own. They got me through a Google Summer of Code, guided me on dual-booting Linux, and gave me my first taste of open-source Python library development. This stuff was so transformative that now I don’t let any undergrad sleep on this kind of exposure—every class of mine encourages computer use. It’s surprising how reluctant people are to pick programming up even now. But I’d hate for anyone to feel as useless as I did in grad school (or at a job where one may not have the time to really learn) just because their undergraduate education didn’t deliver.

Even in the age of LLMs and coding assistants, I think it’s a useful skill to have and so I introduce students to normal coding in the early years and then how these new tools can augment their existing skillset.

This took me a long time to write, and I’m curious whether it resonates with others who came to computing late—or from the other side, whether it’s legible to people who grew up with unfettered access. My email is angadhn at gmail.