A Visionary

     It was his 70th birthday. Relatives were all gathered. I was also with them.

    I am usually shy with public speaking. But that day, I felt I must speak.  

    People were remembering him as an individual. His humor, his weird habits, his sunny pleasant character, his Hindi songs ..all these were recounted and remembered. 

    But, I wanted to give a social speech about him. I wanted to remember him, not as an individual who had touched me (he had, very deeply), but as a "visionary."  I wanted to introduce him to all of us, as a person who could see the future.  I wanted to "place" his contributions to the world, to the next generation, especially the next generation in our larger family.  

    He used to work in a bank.  It must have been in his forties, that he resigned from his job, chasing dreams that no one understood.  He joined the first batch of Engineering graduates in Trivandrum Engineering college in a discipline that was just introduced - Computer Science.  

    He must have been older than all his classmates.  He joined the course because he was already knowledgeable in the possibilities computers represented in the world.  He could, unlike many of us, and perhaps his teachers and classmates included, see the future.  

    He knew this thing that he was currently obsessed with would profoundly change the world.  He gave up his job and never got into any private company at that time.  Instead, he became an entrepreneur and set up a small computer centre in the middle of Calicut town.  

    This became a place where young boys (I notice the gendered story here) from the larger family came to play with the machine.  He smilingly indulged them.  Night after night was dedicated to the play - solving of some abstract mathematical puzzle in newer and newer languages coming up that the machine was throwing out.  I heard strange words like "Cobol" etc being bandied about in the house those days.  

    Now, looking back at the path the world took, we can clearly see, that he could see then - the next turn the world would take.  But, he was not instrumentally using this knowledge.  Like all visionaries, his pleasure was in the game itself - it was hardly in the winning!  

    I wanted to say  all this, and much more.  But, somehow, I didn't.