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There is one thing in my life that has always been constant ever since I was born. It didn’t matter if it was a good or a bad time. It was the first time our house had a computer. Little did I know that it would pave the road for my future. 

The first memory I had of the computer was sitting on my mother’s lap and playing a bow and arrow game. It was a very simple game, with a green background and balloons flying around the screen as we had to use the bow to shoot the balloon down. For sure this is one of the few memories I have from the first few years of my life. As I grew older, I loved to spend time on the computer. My mom had bought a game for my brother and I, which we used to have a lot of fun playing. At the start, it was me sitting on the armrest of the chair and watching my brother play the game. It was and is one of my best memories with him. 

As someone who didn’t really enjoy sports, this computer was mainly my source of fun until the 6th grade. I was about 12 years old at the time and looking back I must say that the computer was definitely worth every bit. By this time the computer was really showing its age. It was slow and hard to use. This is when after my final exam my dad came home at night with two laptop bags on his shoulder. He called me to him as he took out the laptop and asked me if I wanted his old work laptop. I was beyond excited. I couldn’t believe it, and before I knew it, I started coding on it. This was the first time I did something other than play games on any computer. I was just curious to try out new things. This feeling was even stronger due to the fact that we had just installed home internet during this time. 

On my next birthday, I made a game and bought a couple of CDs. I used those as a return gift for my birthday party. I was feeling on top of the world but little did I know that the most challenging part of my life at that moment was waiting at my doorstep. 

Days passed as I entered 9th grade. I was quite frankly useless and very hard to deal with. I nagged my parents for getting a better laptop even though I was not really performing great at school, and neither was my family in a good financial situation. I even failed a few subjects and kept nagging. To this day I regret how I behaved at that time. Other than nagging and being hard to deal with, I distanced myself from people and just wanted nothing to do with anyone. I remember wanting to just go and stay in a box forever without needing to talk to anyone. Because of me being like this, my dad still went ahead and bought me what I was nagging for, despite being in a bad financial situation. What did I do once the new laptop came? Just continued to waste my time browsing the internet, demanding things from people around me even though I had no right to. As much as I would like to blame some things around me that made me this way, in the end, I wasn’t trying to make myself better. Looking back this is one of the parts of my life I really regret and feel guilty about. Now it has become learning but if I had the chance I would stop my past self from doing this.

This attitude went on until the end of my 10th grade. This is when I left India and went to Singapore. I instantly realized that my being demanding with a bad attitude is not going to be tolerated. If I continued the act that way I would have to face life-altering consequences. Since my education was fully focused on IT, I started to enjoy the process of learning about new technologies, software, and coding languages. Here I was being noticed and the feeling of being useless started to fade away.

Being in another country alone helped me discover myself more than anything else. It allowed me to really reflect and change my attitude towards a lot of things. Soon I started saying “Yes” to opportunities and started doing projects with clients to build mobile apps. Things I learned in the 7th grade came rushing back to me and the satisfaction of developing new things really made me realize how much I can do if I try. As time passed, I started taking on more projects and soon graduated with my degree. I came back to India and started working from home. My job ended up making me better in every aspect of life. As I am writing this I realize that I have had a relationship with tech in some form or another at any given point in my life. It has led me to be what I am today. I don’t do my job only because it’s my job, I do it because it is fun for me to develop new things using coding.

I have turned what was only innocent fun or a hobby into a job. It has been a wonderful journey with tech, throughout the ups and downs of my life. Now that I deal with it daily for many reasons, I enjoy it a lot. I am excited about what the future brings in terms of my relationship with tech and computers in general. Looking back at my journey I can say that my life would have been drastically different without that very first computer.