About

In the Beginning

My coding journey began before I owned a computer. It began, in a little corner in India, in a village next to an industrial town where my dad lived and worked as an Engineer. This was one of the leading I.T. Training institutes back then called 'Aptech'. I remember working on this tiny desktop which was an early Mac, picking up application programming skills. I was hooked, especially since I aced that.

Over the Years

But the jobs. Somehow the only job I managed to procure was in my core specialization - Finance and Accounting. I was a financial auditor for while until I moved on to payroll accounting working for the Indian branch of an I.T. Consulting company, now defunct, headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA. I was now on a PC, picking up MS Windows and MS DOS on the job. And yes, MS Excel. What kind of accountant doesn't brag about spreadsheets & macros? Wonder how many remember something called 'LOTUS' and 'TALLY'. Four years later I was working on my Master's in Information Systems at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Walls, Hurdles, and Worse

Sadly, by the eve of my graduation in December, 2001, the I.T. Visas were drying up. Companies that had promised jobs just two months ago, were pulling out. Right after, I went back to India, only to return to Seattle or Redmond, WA. Work Visas were still unavailable for a newbie like me. On an L2, I did volunteer work, kept busy, and kept trying. Right there at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, I picked up .Net and OOP. I'd already learnt every bit of JAVA. Things were frustrating and while it did seem like the obvious thing to do would be 'going it alone', I had some reservations about that, mainly due to my non-permanent status. And sure enough, we were back in India soon. The job market in India was burgeoning at the time and as luck would have it I found myself working for a top I.T. Consulting company in Chennai, India. But it was not to be. The job did not go well. The incidents that occurred there had nothing to do with my skills or the project or the onsite clients. What happened there, I try to decode even today in my dreams or rather nightmares. Other jobs were around, and yada, yada, yada, a few years later I found myself back in America on an L2. By this time I would have lost yet another opportunity. An H1b that came after a very good job offer in Chicago would fizzle right around Lehman Bros. It was back to scrounging for volunteering opportunities in New Jersey.

And Now...

These days, there's a heated debate on about the ills of social media, and on social media! I think of it as a mixed bag, just like life. When it seems obviously skewed you know you can suspect some kind of foul play. I veered into blogging and on some of my favorite topics, like fiction. I have great respect for enterprising young people who've managed to hang on to something in the blogging world. I learnt that dealing with spam online is a full-time job. To be a successful blogger, you will need a trick or two plus at least a few assistants working full time. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just me. After various attempts at different little I.T. Projects, here is one more. Crossword Grids. This comes to you from Poughkeepsie, NY. And oh, I am an American Citizen now. FYI: Before speculation begins - How?! When!? I solved my first crosswords when I was eighteen. It was a standard 15*15 grid printed in a leading Indian Daily called "The Hindu" which itself was reproduced from another well-known Daily called "The Telegraph". On and Off I'd try that, whenever I had the time. A few years later, I was attempting cryptic crosswords and these 15*15 became passe. This hobby does "spark a lot of joy" like I heard someone say about something or the other. It hasn't been easy. I feel like I should be given a medal for patience and something else yet undefined. A quality in humans that is evolving and is yet to be discovered by psychologists, that allows one to persevere despite wink-wink rumors from power grids across nations and worse. Fingers Crossed!