The first time I ever experienced the web was when I was in college training to be a vet. The rest of India had been benefiting from the Internet for quite some time before somebody up there finally had the sanity of allowing the same in Kashmir. I did not have a computer then nor the hope that I would be able to afford one in the near future.
Computers were my fascination and ever since I could lay my hands on one in class 6 at the Tyndale Biscoe School, I always dreamt of owning one. During school we learnt on BBC computers running BASIC (Beginners Allpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and I was quite good at it. In 6th-A I was not the best student (though those days just being in the A section was considered somewhat of an exclusivity) but I distinctly remember my computer teachers were quite impressed with the aggressive programming skills I possessed. I remained in that “For-Next-Loop” all through school.
Then came the 90’s and life was at its lowest ebb. Fortunately when I got selected for the BVSc course the new syllabus of VCI (Veterinary Council of India) was implemented and believe it or not in our first semester we had a 6 month course on “Bioinformatics and Computer Application”. The old romance was resurrected and is continuing ever since.
From FORTAN, COBOL, WORDSTAR to FOX PRO and then Windows 3.1, 98, ME, XP and now Vista and Linux. I tried my hand at everything. I just had to see an unoccupied computer somewhere – my claws would emerge, saliva drool and I would see myself running towards it. Nonetheless this un-natural interest of a veterinary medical student in the non-living digito-binary world did not affect his primary studies. I finished college as a university topper and got a gold-medal for it.
When Internet came to Kashmir around the year 1998-99 I could not initially fathom the depth and scope of this technology except as a means of communication through the electronic mail or email as we so lovingly call it today. I felt so privileged when I had my own email account in hotmail. I was royalty, nobody I knew or met had one. Yet when I checked my mails by visiting CIC (the first cyber cafe in Kashmir then) this very fact troubled me, what is the fun of having an email account when there is no one you could mail to. Slowly I moved beyond emailing and found the huge resources(especially by Kashmiri standards then and maybe now too) that were present on the WWW. I not only got the latest and best knowledge about various subject I studied at college but I learnt so much more about many of the other things I liked, I made friends – mostly on Yahoo (when it was filled with real people and not bots) and even had a collection of my most loved files in the large floppy box at home. As days passed by the web consumed and intrigued me .
Somewhere in 2001 I decided that before the harvest of all the years of surfing the web is washed out by fungus and magnetic fields I should have a website to host these resources online. I was just out of college and then back in pursuing a postgraduate degree in Genetics, I had no money of my own and felt too bad when I had to ask my folks at home for an additional 1000 odd bucks every time I had to present a credit seminar. The lowest estimate that a friendly web-developer gave me was many many times this sum. There was only one way out, I resolved to learn all that is about web development on my own. I read over 500 books, countless pages and tutorials on the web and attended courses at at least 3 institutes before I launched my dream website in 2004, I called it KASHVET. The same year I purchased my first PC.
Its been many years since and I must have treated countless animals while working in the Department of Animal Husbandry Kashmir and made scores of websites for my friends and relations. But even today, whenever someone asks me to make a website or do something creative on the computer I get the same feeling of euphoria. Its like a never ending love affair where the emotions don’t wane over time. The passion of a devout webophrenic….
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