The Unexpected Coach

October 15 is the 92nd birth anniversary of Dr. ABJ Abdul Kalam, this article from my personal experience is to express my gratitude for the great teacher of our time.

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear.

When the student is truly ready... The teacher will Disappear.” 

                                                                                                  ― Tao Te Ching

The sun was dipping below the horizon, casting its golden glow over the large crowd gathered. The speaker on the stage appeared frugal, yet his speech was captivating, filled with hope and dreams. I was at the very back of the gathering, in my third year of engineering, at the campus, listening intently to Dr. ABJ Abdul Kalam, who was then the principal scientific advisor to the prime minister.

Now, I recall the speech was captivating not any other details, except for one message: a warning of sorts. He was trying to persuade the students pursuing fundamental disciplines such as mechanical engineering not to take up a job in software development (read coding). 

It was late 1999, and becoming a programmer was all the rage back then. Skyrocketing demands and shortages driven by the looming Y2K problem and the emergence of the e-commerce industry meant that a lucrative job was guaranteed for anyone who could code. However, Dr. Kalam's warning was that this could make us irrelevant in the future because we would lack the fundamentals, like a building without a foundation.

I listened to the speech intently, however, it did not make any dent in my universe. The next evening I took the bus to the nearest town, some 20 kilometers away, for my class for programming. I was in mechanical engineering, but loved computers, gaming, and coding more than strength of materials and fluid mechanics. I spent all my free time reading about computers (Chip, Digit, are they still in publication :-)), and electronics, burning the midnight oil at the college computer lab, and writing programs that solved problems from the strength of materials book.

I was deeply conflicted. The idea was to find a job as a programmer right after graduation and ride the wave of the dot com boom.

More than a year passed by, and I was at home, it was midday. I got a phone call from my friend who had gone to college to collect the final-semester results. He delivered the message: we were graduating. The looming question was what is next? We talked about a few things we could do. The job market was tight, so if we needed to find a job, we needed to differentiate ourselves, we needed something more than a degree.

Should we set sail to Chennai, learn Java, and join the e-commerce bandwagon (in those times, top-tier universities offered courses like Java with assured placement). 

In a flash, I remembered what Dr. Kalam had said more than a year ago. I reminded my friend, and we debated for some time. It started to occur to both of us "Maybe this is not a good idea - we do not have a computer science background, we lack the basics. By this time the Dot-Com bubble bust and the news about the homeless people in San Francisco did not help either. We concluded we should pursue something in mechanical engineering, in product design."

It was a brilliant moment of clarity, like sunlight tearing through the dark clouds.  -The teacher did appear when the student was ready.

My friend took the initiative, and he eventually learned about CITD in Hyderabad, We, nine of us, classmates, set sail in the next week, to learn more about design and manufacturing, and the course of our career was set in a different direction.

Many years later, in Bangalore, in a community setting, I realized how true Dr. Kalam's words were when I met someone who was working in software development but was an electrical engineer. I saw how insecure he was, struggling to keep up with the advancements in the software domain, and unable to progress in his career as much as he would like to.

Recently, while talking about this, one of my friends asked me if I ever regretted spending a lot of time learning programming. Was it a total waste of time and effort?  I said no! 

Learning programming immensely benefited me. I learned how to break down problems into smaller pieces, solve them, and stitch everything together. This has immensely helped me in my personal life and when I encounter complex project challenges at work. And, also, I was grateful for that day I was listening to Dr. Kalam, not only for the much-needed course correction but also for opening me up to his biography "Wings of Fire," which changed my perspective about leadership. 

He was my unexpected coach.

PS - This is the writing of the speech I delivered at IIM-B Orators Club recently, my speech evaluator during the evaluation partly disagreed with me. He is a mechanical engineer now writing software that solves design problems. His point of view was, that a mechanical engineer writing software for e-commerce vs. design provides different career trajectories. He had a point.