Part 2 : The 80s Kids: How IT and the Job Market Shaped a Generation

The Boom We Walked Into

I used to play cricket about half a kilometre from Narayana Murthy's house in Jayanagar.

I rode past his street on the Top Gear cycle on weekends. I knew the lane. I knew the name on the gate. I had no idea I was passing the home of the man who was building the future my generation was about to be routed into. Nobody in my house was saying his name out loud yet.

That is the truest sentence I can write about being in Bangalore in the 2000s. The future was being built down the road.

The K replaced 1000

Sometime between 2000 and 2001, the language of money in our city quietly changed.

When my dad was my age, ₹1000 was 1000. By the time I was thirteen, salaries were being quoted in K. ₹40K. ₹50K. The K walked into Indian middle-class vocabulary the way Y2K had walked in quietly, completely, without anyone noticing.

But the dining table had not caught up. Public sector bank job, Government clerk, Indian Railways, BSNL, BHEL and HAL were the bright futures the elders had grown up with. IT was new, glamorous, and had no pension. My cousins and neighbours were in a real dilemma. None of the high school kids, was the ones deciding what to next after 12th.

Hotmail was the bridge

The first internet I touched in my life was a Hotmail account. Not for school. Not for play. For the family in America.

I would walk to the cyber café in JP Nagar near RV dental in the evenings, log in, type a message, and walk home. The internet entered our lives as a bridge to family before it became anything else. To my friends, the same café was Age of Empires and PlayStation. For me, it started as Hotmail and grew into the games later. I think for a lot of 80s kids, the internet came in dressed as family first, and only later put on the costume of entertainment.

The plan

In 10th standard, I had a plan.

Software engineer first, and then MBA. Then I would manage these tech companies. A sure shot win, according to me.

I was imagining, I guess.

That is what fifteen-year-olds do. We do not yet know the difference between a plan and an aspiration. We do not yet know that the five steps ahead of us depend on a hundred steps the system has been quietly running underneath us since we were eight. But I had the plan. The plan felt real. And that feeling that I was inside the story they were all telling was the closest thing to confidence I had ever had.

The first language they had been teaching me

The medium of instruction at St Paul's was English. not Kannada, not Hindi but English. My report card was marked on English ( prose and poetry) and English 2 (Grammar). We diagrammed sentences. We were graded on grammar as if it were a science. We dissected Shakespeare in class.

I asked myself, much later, why I had ever studied prose and poetry. Why I had ever cared about English grammar.

I understand it now. Looking back, I don't think schools were consciously trying to create software engineers. But the practical effect was the same. We graduated able to write a clean email, sit on a call with a US client, and operate in a language that connected us to the world's largest technology markets. The British had left us a language. The schools had quietly turned it into a vocational skill. Y2K was the moment the world realised what India had silently been building for forty years.

My first language was English. That was the loophole into America that nobody had told me was a loophole.

Decent at C, late to the real run

I was pretty decent at C. I could draw a flow chart. I could write an algorithm and write "IF and else" in C I thought that was enough to be a software engineer.

What I did not know was that the languages that mattered in the industry were not just C. They were C#, Java, and COBOL on the mainframes that still ran the world's banks. I knew none of them. The school had taught me the syntax of a single room. It had not told me the building was made of languages it had never named.

For 11th and 12th, I went to Vijaya Junior College in Jayanagar. PCMC stream. I joined Vijaya because my friends were joining. There was no second-order strategy. No "which college has the best CET pass rate." My friends were going there, so I was going there, and that was how the decision got made.

My parents agreed. They were busy arranging money for fees and coaching. Then I walked into tuitions for 12 and CET coaching. I saw something I did not expect.

The kids had already been coached after they finished 10th standard.

They were six months ahead. Their notes were filled. The teachers knew their names. They were on practice paper number twelve while I was opening practice paper number one. The coaching infrastructure had professionalised, and most of us my family or I did not know the starting gun had been fired.

I did not tell my parents I was already behind. They were arranging the money. I was trying. We were both doing our jobs. Nobody in the house had the vocabulary to say "you started this race late."

The friends who were hiding their preparation

A few of my friends at Vijaya Jr were quietly attending tuitions of their own. They were already preparing for the next step: TOEFL, IELTS, and the US path. They didn't tell me or anyone around them.

The cohort that should have been allies was already a quiet competition. The information that could have helped others was being hoarded by the kids whose parents had figured out the game two years earlier. The race had already started, and even the runners next to us were not telling us where the finish line was.

The results, the seat, the verdict

My CET marks did not get me into the colleges my mother had been hoping for. My COMEDK marks got me a seat at an engineering college on the outskirts of Bangalore.

The mood at home split. My dad was happy I had passed. The kid had cleared the system. My mom was disappointed that CET had not gone through. She had been quietly carrying a different version of my future, and that version stopped being possible the day the results came out.

There was no fight. There was no big scene. There was the day-to-day shape of the house adjusting around a result that was lower than the target.

The COMEDK seat came with higher fees than the CET seat would have. Which meant the parents who had been arranging money for coaching were now arranging more money for the seat itself. The victory of admission was itself a financial blow. That's when the Canara Bank education loan came into play with a higher interest rate than an auto loan. My father signed his name on a debt that would follow me into my first job.loan

And the Employee community, the salaried relatives and neighbours with whom my parents had been quietly measured against my whole childhood, read the outskirts, unknown college as a defeat. I was the first grandson on that side of the family. They had been watching. They had a verdict.

Nobody said it to my face. They did not have to. The verdict travelled in the silences at family functions. The defeat was not mine. It was a community judgment, and the family had to absorb it.

What I could only see in hindsight

I was eighteen, holding a COMEDK seat letter, with the Employee community's quiet verdict in my pocket, my father's loan signature at Canara Bank.

I had a seat. I had a loan. I had a vague plan. I did not yet know what any of them would cost.

That was enough, that summer.