It’s Better Late Then Never!!!

Ever since www fever struck me seven years back, there was a small desire inside me to do something on the web of my interest. Time passed on; and slowly I started learning new things. It all started on one fine evening (24 Sep’ 2001 being precise) when I made my first Email ID. That too with a lot of help from my friend Sharad. The 64kbps connections sucked big time those days. I had to pay the net charges and also for the patties and coffee which was an additional Ghoose for helping me out for doing one of the biggest thing in my life.

Immediately it felt like I was somebody big and recognizable may be of the ranks of Bill Gates. Owning an Email ID was like having a bank account or a real estate for me at that time. Immediately after that I started making IDs like a freak Yahoo, Rediff, Indiatimes and so on I made email ID on almost every portal. At one time I had more then 50 email IDs with me one each for communicating with a certain group. Though slowly I realized the importance of a single ID Currently in love with Yahoo Mail.

Chatting was one of the hot properties that time, and it was not late that I was infected with the virus. Occasional 2-3 hours soon turned into 5-7 hours a day; classes, hostel, friends became secondary things in my life. Sometimes I even skipped my lunch and dinner for chatting. Bloody skipping, actually didn’t had money for that, after spending 6-7 hrs at cafe that too at an hourly rate of Rs. 10, were the hell one would expect money. But overall had a great time and made some very good friends especially some hot chicks from abroad. Played some memorable pranks on my friends (Gaurav will kill me for this). Explored almost each and every facet of chat world and searched almost every nook and corner of chat rooms, even the 18+ ones, after all It was legal for me in 2001. The best ones were the chat rooms filled with all boys pretending to be a female via some raunchy alias name. Everybody in the room simply licked their lips to get a personalized IM window ping from that so called She.

Though regular surfing of porn continued. After all the entire WWW system is there because of this intrinsic human need. I discovered many great sites during those days which are still my best friend during my most intimate moments.

During the fall winter of the year 2002, I suddenly got an opportunity to design the website of my institute. That great project was an effort from Dhanno (Dhananjay) and GB (Gaurav). I don’t know how I became a part of the project, but once I was there, I was there 100 %. Dhanno handled the technicalities of the website after all he was the best brain amongst us, mind it only in terms of studies, Gaurav handled content management and project coordination He still handles the same profile of coordination and gyan sessions, and lastly me I handled graphic designing and overall look and feel of the website everybody had believe on my creativity. That single website changed our fortunes and we were among the heroes of the batch. Not Dhanno as he was already Rank 1 in the class. We got our separate cabin of Webmaster and a Compaq system to work on. Actually that website also gave me my most cherished word in life First “GOOD” from my father. Thereafter it was a web designer inside me for the next one year; I designed few more. Deep inside my heart there was still a small dream of making my own homepage.

City changed and things change accordingly, with a new institute my life took a different turn. Due to the pressure of studies and placement the web designer got lost somewhere. Actually there was no pressure as such, it was that I was not getting enough time for my passion NFS, Quake, UT, Doom……and also prerequisite 10 hr of sleep. Your body needs quite a bit of rest if you drive a Mc Laren F1 at 375 kmph or fire 200 shots on a rail gun for 3-4 hours. Ask Schumacher or somebody from SWAT. Internet usage got restricted to Google and other similar search engines. As most of the time (not really) I was searching some good white paper, so that I can copy them and can get some good grades, which eventually I was deprived of during my MBA. Infact during those two years I realized that MBA is not about Kotler’s 4 Ps or Porter’s 5 forces model, its actually about 3 Cs (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V). Probably I should patent this term.

I encountered one innovative application and that was P-2-P software. What a smart thing to download your favorite videos, thank god it was better than those B-2-B and B-2-C in marketing classes. As we got separate net connection in every room, we utilized even the last kilobyte of bandwidth to download and share stuff, mostly ‘X’ rated.

It was destined that I will land up in some Dot Come, and same happened. Though initial years were somewhat turbulent as I was selling the concept which was not at all popular and was new to Indian market, though today they make big business sense, and every media giant is opening a property portal.

Many good things come in life a bit late but they do make a lot of difference. Social networking sites were one of them. They actually took the market by storm, and it was not very late that I got back all my lost contacts and old friends. The impact was so huge that in no time it was the first thing that I opened every morning even before my Microsoft Outlook.

One job to another and one media house to another. I feel proud to be associated with a media company because sometimes those press stickers at the back of your vehicle save you from cops and give you entry in certain VIP sections. I again landed on a Dot Com company. Here I was infected with a new viruses of Blogging (Not that new to me as I was familiar with them courtesy Ramit), Ajax pages, Web 2.0 etc. The web designer inside me reincarnated and I again started dreaming of my own web page.

That’s why I started with some free web pages at Google pages and thought having my own Blog. Thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for incorporating such a great company, hats off to you guys. I have started this blog by the name MypikC which means My+Pick+See i.e. I will pick the topics which are HOT and will give information, insight and views (Discussion and criticism most welcome) about them. Hope so my concept will work and soon this blog will be a place for information seeker.

In a nutshell that was something about my interaction with www for the past few years, and now I am striving to get my own URL and @myname Email ID soon.

Check out this space for some interesting stuff….

SR