COMMENDATION
01 Jan 1992
“ I am Pleased to know that while carrying out
the duties of Deputy Director at BIS branch office, Bangalore You have
displayed utmost dedication and professional competence of very high order.
Your selflessness, Capacity for sustained hard
work and honesty of purpose have rendered you worthy of my commendation. Your
meritorious performance is in keeping with finest traditions of this bureau.
I have directed that a note of this
commendation be made in your record of service ”
It was certainly a huge surprise. I consider this award to me not
as a result of my career ambition or any
professional motivation, but as a reward
for my passion for technology.
Later someone asked me “Why did you not get
this award again ? ”` There is only one answer “Award system was abolished after that year”.
1982 to
1992. – In that period, we used to make copies of letters by typing the
entire letter using the typewriters. Today one cannot imagine an office without
computer, copier, fax, scanner, mobile, wireless, laptop, projectors etc. May
be at some point time, people may find difficult to believe that offices
functioned without all these gadgets. At that time, my office was headed
by a simple and straight forward officer
who used to encourage youngsters.
PC-AT - During the year 1991, my
office has decided to go for computerization and my Bangalore office was allocated
one PC AT(Today it is a museum piece). Arrangements were made to install
the PC. It was very much similar to a wedding arrangement. “An Air-conditioner, Carpeting, Re-wiring, Computer
table, Chair, Door closer, Notice board and a small peeping hole on the door".
A small notice was also stuck on the
door “Remove your foot wears ". Added to this, a visitors register was kept to keep
log of people going inside.
Arrival of this small machine generated lot of curiosity.
A big book containing the commands of " MS-DOS" was donated to our office.
I started picking up the basic commands from
this and started typing some notes and slowly the letters. Vey soon I
mastered MS- Word, Lotus, MS Excel. DBase-III, Paint, Compilers, Quick pro, Foxpro,
DbaseIV, compiler,basics of C, Assembly language and computer chip fundamentals
etc. I got lot of confidence and I started inspiring others to use the machine.
My family supported me completely in my studies and my kids lost lot of my
time. But we used to go once in a way to Mysore which was really worth seeing
those days.
In one trip we took Pappa and Mummy also to Mysore in our small car.
Programming -From database operations, I slowly
migrated to programming and wrote small small
routines. I remember when I made these programmes, I got a feeling of creativity( For a menu I had to write more
than 100 lines ).May be that was the real motivation.
My addiction to computer had lot of bad effects. It became an obsession with programming. Fancy ideas used to flash in my
mind. Ideas such as user friendly screen, blinking colours, validations of
entry with those vintage software were real challenges. My family also got
little bit disturbed with my passion as I was always spending lot of time on
and off computer.
Sometime later that year our regional head visited our office and during his review, he was
told about our progress on usage of computers and the work done by me. He spent
some time with me and observed patiently all the work I have done. He was
very interested in computer and was happy to see the progress. This might have
contributed for this award.
I spent lot of money and time in buying books,
reading, collecting books and spent lot of time with PC even after office hours. Many days went home with lot of
disappointments of failed programs, unexpected bugs, unsolved errors etc, etc
which have taken away a lot of my personal time. I tried to understand this little machine as
much as possible, drives, floppies, its design, memory and architecture etc.
However somewhere on the way I deliberately weaned out of this obsession and
started focusing on other issues.
Computer became a part and parcel of my life. But when I look back this entire
episode taught me a lesson to take any challenge as an opportunity knocking at
your door step.