To Boldly Do What I've Never Done Before

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" was the mission of the USS Enterprise led by the iconic Capt. James T. Kirk, assisted by Mr. Spock, the Vulcan with his abhorrence of all things illogical, along with the rest of the crew of that fantastic spaceship. That most of the planets they visited were of "type M" and the aliens mostly English-speaking humanoids, was, of course, beside the point. The fact remains that the original "Star Trek" television series was an integral part of my growing up in the '70s and has acquired a cult status over the ensuing decades for generations of viewers. On hindsight, the fact that the show first aired in 1966, just a few months before I was born, appears symbolic.

Back in the '80s I was blissfully treading the "realms of gold", lost in my love of literature, dreaming of a life devoted to the Muses. The day I handed in my last ICSE exam paper, I came home filled with an unbelievable serenity of spirit. With a sense of boundless joy and relief, I laid my Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology text books to rest, forever.

It was not that I hated the STEM disciplines; it's just that I loved poetry more, and never again would my single-minded pursuit of my passion be distracted by things as mundane as the Pythagorean Theorem or Boyle's Law. My father was my staunch supporter in this, for he thought there was nothing I could not do if I set my mind to it, and that doing something I had never done before was just a way of proving that I was his daughter. Equally adept at mathematics and literature (both English and Sanskrit), my father had pursued a very successful career in journalism spanning three and a half decades.

Never again. At least that's what I thought.

My undergraduate years at Presidency College and the University of Calcutta (c. 1985 – 1991), however, brought me in contact with some of the most brilliant academics who, among other things, taught me to appreciate the best and highest achievements of the greatest minds in the history of human civilization. Be it “Paradise Lost” or the Homeric epics, Dante or Francis Bacon, Aeschylus or James Joyce, early Byzantine art or Tagore's "Geetanjali", the most prominent train of thought that binds us to those minds is that the domain of knowledge is boundless, experience is multifaceted, there is no such thing as an absolute truth, that appearances do not always conform to reality, and nothing can keep the human spirit from aspiring to heights never imagined before.

I gradually came to realize the truth of the saying “to know only Shakespeare is to know nothing of Shakespeare” – a conundrum put to us by the late Professor Kajal Sengupta, 'Kajal Di' to students and colleagues alike, who would mesmerize us with her dynamic presence and her powerful, albeit unconventional, interpretation of any piece of text no matter how complex. Expecting the unexpected in studying literature was a given at Presidency. The fact that literature is a force that shapes and is in turn shaped by a host of other forces that include even the scientific and technological changes that disrupt and revolutionize the sociocultural fabric, and that these forces affect the art, architecture, music, economy and all other aspects of a period, is something that began to dawn on me at this time. How could a study of Renaissance literature be complete without at least a basic understanding of the works of men like Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Leibniz, Johannes Kepler, to name only a few?

Cut to the summer of 1993. I have earned my Master of Arts in English Literature from Calcutta University and completed three semesters at NIIT studying computer systems, software design and development, COBOL, Unix, C programming and the rudiments of databases and SQL offered by dBASE IV. I have already ruffled a lot of feathers attempting to do something that no one in their right mind would even dream of – embarking on a career in technology without a degree from a recognized engineering college and, what’s worse, without even a math/science academic background.

The next thing I know is that I have joined my first company KRIS Systems Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata, as a trainee programmer. My manager, Mr. Bose, our Systems Manager and second in command in the organization, has taken me to meet my first client – a small tea company operating from a residential apartment in South Kolkata. This company, I am told, needs a tea sales and accounting software package designed to suit their requirements. Now I am being introduced to the Managing Director, (a slender, pretty young lady not much older than I am), and the other employees who happen to be the principal stakeholders. I am being shown to my workstation – a single desktop PC with a monochrome monitor running on MS-DOS 6.x gracing a tiny table top. One of the employees is telling me, with considerable pride, that the machine has FoxBASE installed and I am suitably impressed. This, in a nutshell, constitutes my development, test and production environments all rolled into one. I have my hardware, my software and my customer team with their requirements.

Expectations – a complete software application to automate their sales and accounting processes. Time frame – seven days.

Have I done this before? Good heavens, no!!

Can I do it? I told myself that I could either sink or swim. I chose to swim.

Several missed deadlines later, I did deliver the project to the satisfaction of my client. One of the reasons I was able to do it was the indefatigable guidance and support of my manager Mr. Subrata Bose, and his unwavering confidence in my capabilities. To him I owe a great deal of my understanding of computers, and their unlimited potential in all spheres of life.

The best thing about that first project was, of course, that it prepared me for my next big RDBMS project on Sybase. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Sybase products and technologies.

Finally, cut back to the present. I have recently enrolled for a Data Science and Machine Learning course. Having spent a quarter of a century handling databases, data warehouses and huge volumes of customer data, that seems to be the next logical step. The first couple of Python classes tell me that I have no option but to re-open those Math text books (!!sigh!!) that I had laid to rest thirty-five years ago.

So it seems that I have turned a full circle and ended up teaching myself linear algebra, scalars, vectors and matrices, and the basic concepts of statistics and probability.

Life, indeed, is a gigantic Sophoclean irony. Oedipus, who ran from his curse all his life, had to come back to save his city from the clutches of the Sphinx by doing something he had never done before – solving a riddle.

"Fascinating!"

It's a deep, vibrant male voice behind me. I don't need to turn around to see who it is. Do you?