Is it ok to not bend and risk breaking?

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I was in the junior college and it was as important as to live to get good results in my 12th grade. As per many, my carrier depended on those results. I did not understand what career meant at that point of time. For me it was fat salary and opportunity to travel and stay in big cities. The huge buildings and mesmerizing sites always had made me daydream. My village was a great place to live at but did not provide enough for appeasing any of my desires or aspirations. I had been very greedy all the way through. I always wanted more and better. In those days the admissions to Engineering depended on how much you score in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

All this subjects carried 100 marks to score from where 80% were for theory and 20% were for practicals in labs. Unlike now a days a separate competitive exam for Engineering admissions was not needed. One mark out of these 300 was equivalent to nearly a million dollars in value. And it was not for sale for me. It could only be scored by knowing, understanding and expressing the subject. But for others it didn't cost that much. Atleast for 60 marks in practical examinations. Some of this marks could be earned through something called as "setting" in those days. My father did not give up to my convincing and did not talk to lab assistant who lived in my village. Many of the parents of my classmates did and I was really mad at my father. I did not understand why he could not help. He told me that he was not going to get me the marks this way. However as an alternative he offered that if I do best in my exams and then if I still didn't get the marks I deserve then he would appeal the HSC board and fight for the score I deserve. I did not understand why he was taking that extremely difficult or impossible route. Exam was over and I did good in my exams and also scored enough to get admitted to a good Engineering college as per standards I had set for one.

I did average in first three years of my engineering. And then there was this final year where it was really important to score again. This year was particularly important as the results appeared on degree certificate. Pune University is a special case in that. For other universities it is not the case and what appears on degree is the average of all four years.
So I had decided to do as much as I practically could to score better. For myself it was a test of what I havd been learning and grasping and I knew it was very important for my confidence to succeed at that point. Those skills were to determine my future and key to my aspirations. I had to build software with whatever knowledge I had gained. I had to do my final year project. So the project had to be a team effort and I was not to do it alone. I needed the partners and I was approached by this already formed group in my class. And we planned to meet after college hours to plan what we would be doing for the rest of our academic years.

The hunt for a project topic was interesting one. We searched on internet, spoke to our project guide and read so many journals. Finally our guide suggested that we look for something called as RBAC (Role Based Access Control) which was then established as one of the security standards by NIST. When we read about it, it was fascinating. We started working towards building the application of it. RBAC was easy to understand as concept. But then we dig deeper and it started to unfold challenges that deterred all of us from enthusiastically pursuing the project. We looked at one of its implementations going on at that point of time in linux community called as se-linux. The implementation was so difficult for us to comprehend at that point in time. And my partners concluded that we can't do it on our own in the limited time we had. They instead decided to buy the project and I learned that majority of my classmates were buying the projects and not building themselves. It was about to cost 16000, and I was to pay 4000 for my share of contribution and I didn't quite like it. It was so important for me to test myself. My partners could not take a risk and the went ahead and made the deal without me. They told me to either pay or join other group. They were helpless and I was frustrated with what was happening. I stopped going to college and was determined to take on the challenge even if it meant risking my academics. I tried very hard. I could not sleep for more that 2-3 hours and all my time was spent in researching further but after some time I realized that I can do it if not the constraint of submitting it in next 3 months. So I skipped my exams. I kept on working further on it.

According to my teachers and many others it was a stupid decision. They tried convincing me that it's not the only factor and I should move on, complete my academics, fetch a nice job and build a good carrier. I simply couldn't understand why any of that was important to me at that point of time when I could build the RBAC enabled app. If it would take time I was ok with it. I realized what a stupid decision it was after my friends got degrees and were taking next step in their life and I was still stuck. After the time had elapsed I had no choice but to keep working on it and completing it, which I did after 6 months of my final exam being over. But I missed the exam form submission for next year as well and the rest of the time in that year wasn't going to be useful.

I created a simple banking application that demonstrated emergency authorization, role hierarchies and separation of duties which you still wouldn't get to see in many applications that need those paradigms. Then there was a stroke of luck and I was approached by a junior project who were searching for a project to buy. They were also intimidated by what they would have to do to build a project by themselves. And I sold the project to that group in 16000. I was guilty of doing what I stood against before a year but then I complemented it with deeper knowledge of Enterprise Java Beans, Persistence mechanisms, Middleware deployment and administration. The examiner of that project was very impressed by the knowledge the project group exhibited and the project itself. He commented that it was one of it's kind and way more than what he expected from engineering students. He rewarded them with a whooping 148 marks out of 150. The way they narrated the story of their project demonstration motivated me futher an it started my startup called ITrojan Infotech.
The tagline was "Knowledge is essentially free. We will charge for educating you". And we delivered 40 academic projects successfully and consistently for three years. I very proudly state that in my resume.

The story of ITrojan and what happened to my own academics is very interesting and I shall narrate it in my upcoming posts.

Thanks for stopping by and reading all the way through.