Formative Years
I often omit this very crucial part of my formative years. When I was in grade 6, my family decided to move back to India. All the friends I made for the last 6 years of my life vanished in a second. I cried before leaving Canada, and I cried for a couple days after going to school in India. I didn't like it at all, the kids were new, I found all of them weird, it was just super different. They found me and my twin brother weird as well. TWINS, that can't really speak Malayalam. It was pretty funny looking back.
I really liked the idea of making a game in grade 6. I told my Dad I wanted to learn, and for some reason, he made us do power points. I wasn't satisfied with the making presentations idea. I decided to learn by myself and I watched some videos on making games on youtube. It involved Unity, and Objective C. Everything the person said in that video was gibberish, I couldn't even install Unity. I was pissed that it was so hard to make a game. Then I found something called HTML & CSS, and supposedly it was easier to make games with HTML, CSS and Javascript, essentially a website. I told my dad, this time I said I wanted to learn how to make a website. So I remember I was following along with a video and try to figure it out. My dad opened up the HTML file and put in the typed in some code <marquee> , basically moving text, with a background of red. I was hooked, it was by far the coolest thing I've seen in all my years of existence. I wanted to learn how to do anything on that canvas.
It looked something like this <- click link
I felt like my parents owed it to me to send me to learn web development as a penance for me being in India. My parents put me and my brother under the mentorship of one of my mom's old students( she used to teach at a local college). Nagaraj changed my life, he taught us how to code. I remember we had to write HTML on paper before we typed out the code. But we learned all the fundamentals really quickly, soon enough we started exploring much more on our own, and then we would explore new area of technology together. In that time period of 3 years we learnt so much about technology.
When we left canada in 2019, we went to say our goodbyes, and I was just so pumped to leave India, that I didn't think about all the people that loved me there too. One of our last classes he told me something that would change my life. He said when I started teaching you guys, I really didn't want to, it was more so a favour to my mom. but then he said I showed him passion, and he looked me in the eye and said, "You have an ability to make people like you". This changed my life, I'm not sure if its true or not, and I don't think I care at this point. I believed it to the core. I took that as a skill for granted, something given to me by God. I started living my life through that skill. Looking back, I was 14-15 at the time, a young man with no confidence outside of coding, and he saw the spark in me, we all have it in us, but when he said those words. It turned into a fire. I felt like I could actually do whatever I wanted do. Whenever I look back and think about things that were hard in life, specifically like stage fright, I've talked to hundreds, a whole lecture hall filled with engineers, and I did stand up comedy. One time for a bodybuilding competition I basically had to get on stage with my underwear in front of hundreds of people. Whenever people ask me how I got the courage or where the resolve came from. I didn't have a solid answer, but it came from those people around me, like Nagaraj, that truly believed in me.
The self-confidence, is a gift you can give others, especially those that look upto you.
I don't have the words to thank you Nagaraj sir.