You will be in school. An average kid who is socially inactive and struggling to score well in exams. Facebook will take off in your city and you may finally see an opportunity to hide behind a screen and socialize with the very people sitting right next to you in class. Your elder brother will help you jump on this bandwagon by creating an account for you. Instead of socializing, you will play games on it all day. Next year, your school will ask everyone to pick a vocational subject for future years. Commerce, French, Physical Education & Computer Science. Your brother who was performing really well in other subjects will be struggling in Computer Science. Knowing you, he will advise you against taking it. Totally accepting your inability to study, you will enroll for French. That year, a lot of students like you will enroll in French. Your teacher will rearrange a few names to balance the classes. You will be one of them.

You will soon walk into a room filled with computers and your anxiety will add up. You may feel like running away. Soon your teacher will type up something in English that won’t make any grammatical sense. It will make appear “Hello World” on a blank screen. You will not find that very hard to follow and you will decide to stay instead of running away.

Weeks will pass by and you will start liking this subject. It will feel like a puzzle to you. The aim of the puzzle is to figure out how to instruct a computer to do something complex. You and your friend will conjure the spirits of the computer and go absolutely bonkers with this raw power. Building scripts that will make your screen go blank, scripts that say “Your computer is hacked”, scripts that overload your school computer’s RAM and cause them to crash. You will also try brute-forcing a Playstation CD inside your computer thinking that will work. Your friend will become mad at you for breaking his CD. You will even jump one step ahead and successfully replace the faces of Angry Birds in the game with your friends’ faces. You may also find it easy to score well in this subject.

After your school ends, you will be suggested to pick a more “logical option”. But with your new-found love for computers, you will feel ever more powerful (and deluded) and pick Science stream as your majors.

You will enter high school. Within the very first week, the delusion will break as you realize that you suck in Physics, Chemistry, and Math. But to keep your honor, you will continue down this dark and unknown path. Trying to keep up with the advanced level studies will keep your morale down. But then you will meet this girl. You will like her but you won’t know how to approach her. So by the societal norms of stalking, you will follow her and start conversations with her on social media. You will soon learn that needs help with a programming project she needs to submit. You will heroically step in to help her with the hope of spending more time with her. This will be your sole motivator and driving force for a year as you figure out how to build this app she needs help with. This plane will come crashing down when you will confess that you like her and she won’t feel the same way about you. You will end up scoring even lower in your exams and get enrolled in a mid-grade engineering college.

While still having a chance to secure a stable future, your father will convince you to enroll in some degree of your pace. You will feel strongly about pursuing this broken road even further and decide to continue engineering. Few months into college, you will start binging a lot of movies and shows and use that as an excuse for looking busy. Enraged and frustrated with the ability of your college to suck the fun element from programming, you will take it upon yourself to light up the coding wizard spirits in you again. You will build an app that plays just one song (quite literally). You will build a number converter that will crash with large numbers. You will even manage to get into existential fights by building an app that reveals the user’s most contacted person (a.k.a their love interest). You will also make trips to the service centers quite often because of having bricked your phone via experimentation. At social meetings, you will spend a good chunk of your time explaining to people how a computer programmer is different than a computer repairman, and how the former is a nobler profession than the other (this will be done to avoid having to “look into” other people’s slow and buggy computers).

Meanwhile, you will stop attending your classes and start pondering on the pointlessness of your career move. Right when you will have lost all hope in yourself, you will land an internship offer from a startup company. There you will be exposed to like-minded people and learn a great deal about the industry standard of programming. Suddenly everything will start to make sense. You will also decide to have a startup of your own, and you will spend the rest of your time telling everyone how you decided to have a startup of your own.

Teamed up with some highly delusional yet motivated people from your college, you will work on an app that will allow parents to track their school buses in real-time. Unbeknownst to how to begin building such a thing, you will hand over the control to your experimental self to figure it all out. You will spend days and nights in front of your screen, trying to iterate and reiterate on the app. Some days you will go to schools to pitch your idea, on others you will sit in school buses at four in the morning to mark their routes. With some luck, one school will get ready to try out your service. A lot of people will download the app, and it will crash beautifully on the very first day.

Never having developed anything which was used by more than a few people, you will understand how different people face different issues. You will spend another few months trying to improve the quality of services. This time it will actually work and will end up helping a lot of parents. The app will scale to more schools. And later the startup will shut down because the founders have different goals.

Few years down the line, while working on some new project late in the night with your baggy eyes, while having that eureka moment, will make you ponder on how life would have been if you didn’t sit in that computer class that day.