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My Experiments with a Word Processor

It was the autumn of 1995 and campus life in my Medschool has hit an all time low. Spandan our annual intercollegiate festival has just concluded and it was time to hit the books and make up for all the lost hours of study.

Being the goofballs that we are, David and I were sitting in the hostel canteen (in Desi lingo the ‘Mess’) having our breakfast (in Medschool lingo having our ‘grub’). We were ruminating about the basketball tournament which our school had won with a 72-66 victory.

Not having much on the social agenda, we were wondering how we could keep ourselves busy during the months before the finals.

“Why not we drive to down to some hill station like Ooty or Kodaikanal?”

“How about going to the beach and chilling out?”

“Even better… How about Dolphin watching? It will be a great ride into the Bay of Bengal” Nah, I can’t swim.

“What about learning Swimming? It’s a great exercise. It will keep your head cool”

“How about learning Yoga or Trancendental Meditation? That’s definitely better for relaxation!”

“How about learning French? You can meet many French girls”

Dosas (with Chutney & Sambar), Tea, such conversation and a round of Carroms was our idea of a perfect Sunday morning.

“Thambi! Chai Edthutu Va!!” (Mess-boy, Please get us some tea). Dayal got us two cups of tea and he sat down witnessing the two champions play Carroms. Dayal was a school drop-out and used to work in our canteen as a Mess-boy. He was a very inquisitive fellow and would always ask us some question and the conversation would go on the whole afternoon. We would discuss a myriad of topics from World News to Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), from stock market to global economic crises.

“Sir, what is a computer? What can u do with it?” asked Dayal. (Typically all his questions would start as open-ended as this question and we would start talking about anything under the sun!).

We told him about Charles Babbage (the first computer) about micro-computers, mainframes, supercomputers, about how India assembles the Param Super-computer literally with components available in the market and how these super-computers are being exported to South-East Asian countries etc.

“How much of computers do you know?” was his next question.

David and I knew what we had to do. That fall, we decided that we will acquire some computer skills.

The very afternoon we went to NIIT, the best Computer teaching institute in town. The receptionist told us that there was a scholarship exam the next day in case we were interested.

We wrote the exam and I topped the state. I was offered the Bhavishya Jyothi Scholarship to do an Advanced Diploma in Computer Applications. David and I became instant heroes in the campus b’coz being medical students, we were learning computers.

Life was simple and I had something to keep me occupied. I bought a state-of-the-art Pentium 166 MHz with MMX computer. It was the second computer in all of the student hostels.

Our Sunday morning breakfast conversation entered a new phase. We would say “Let’s boot him out of the project group” “My brain crashed when my prof asked me the Question” “I think he needs a fdisk” “Ctrl+X this coin into this pocket” “Aah! These newbies”

Dayal, seeing our enthusiasm, wanted to be a part of it. He asked me if he could learn to play some games on my computer. Minesweeper was his favorite game and he started attending a typewriting class to increase his speed of typing. Under David’s tutelage, Dayal passed his high school.

One Sunday morning David said, “Why not we make some money? We can work on some projects on your computer! Or we can compile all the class notes and sell it. Or we could write our own notes and maybe write a book! Or we could help our seniors with their theses and make a cool profit”. We opted for the last option and that was the last leisure breakfast we could afford.

Each thesis was around 200 pages and each page was edited (and many a times completely rewritten) at least 5-6 times. Typing the whole stuff out, getting printouts, incorporating the changes that were made was a test of my organizational and entrepreneurial skills. The final copies were to be bound and delivered to the residents on time so that they could submit it to their professors.

I helped 12 of my seniors that season. Even though it was more than I could chew, I had to help them coz otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to submit their theses on time. I had to rope in the help of three of my classmates who had a decent typing speed.

Phew! That was the busiest time of my life and I got a lot of dirty looks from my girl friend for that. She would go, “Neo, if you need the money, I can loan you some. You don’t need to kill yourself for someone else! Take care of your health.”

I had to do a lot of explaining. It wasn’t the money I was after but the satisfaction that I could help a person in need. It’s the thrill you feel when you know that you are the only person who can do it and you prove to yourself time and again that you are capable of doing whatever you think you can do.

Each of my seniors paid one-fifth of what they would have paid for had it been done by a Desktop-publishing (DTP) guy. Fortunately for them, they never had to bother about spelling or grammatical mistakes.

I had made a small profit and I sponsored Dayal’s education in a bigger city with it.

Dayal has now finished his Bachelors in Computer Science and he works for a software company. He plans on doing his Masters in Computer Science soon.

Someone rightly said:-

You give me food, I will be happy for a day

You give me money, I will be happy for a month

You give me education, I will be happy for a lifetime.

J Neo