Picture this*: X = an automotive engineer. Y = X’s friend!

When Y’s car stops working, Y probably calls the garage and not X to help fix the car.

Move the pictured scenario to X = computer engineer. Now if Y’s computer breaks down, Y calls X, says ‘Mayday’ and expects X to help fix the computer!

Both a car and a computer are pretty complex things! So why the disparity? [In my case its probably got to do with the Indian IT syndrome - most Indians can fix software issues so all Y's, for me as a X, expect me to fix their computer!]

But really – why can’t a computer engineer always fix computer problems or an electrical engineer fix all kinds of electrical problems? Is it because most professionals tend to work more on the fancy stuff than on the basics? To succeed in their respective fields, each finds the need to evolve by adapting to the new/cutting-edge/innovative developments of his/her field. And in pursuing all of this, they keep moving away from the basics.

I guess most professionals do this. And they do it well. They excel at what they do daily, their niche skills become finer and finer and they compete with each other within a subset of their domain.

I did the same. Until I came across an interesting project.

My uncle (Harshad Kamdar) has been a very active contributor to a lot of initiatives, particularly the Vigyan Ashram and Save Bombay Committee (SBC). My father (Trilok Kamdar), as well, has been a leading Rotarian for over a dozen years. Through their acquaintances I first came across the Sevadham Trust Pune and met Dr. S.V.Gore. Dr. Gore had led numerous social efforts in the fields of medical care, poverty eradication and rural illiteracy since the 70’s. His trust also ran a tribal residential school at Malegaon-Khurd. As part of this school project, Sevadham had persevered since 1994 to convince the tribal groups in nearby areas to send their children to the school for education. As of 2009, they had over 340 students who were provided free education, accommodation, meals, uniforms, books and medical assistance. With the help of Rotary, the trust also setup a computer lab.

L to R: Nilesh in the classroom, the school, the computer lab and the area around.

When the three of us (I, Nilesh and Hitesh) met Dr. Gore we had no clear plan of how we wanted to contribute. Dr. Gore set up our first visit and offered the luxury of going in a jeep instead of the state transport bus (the quintessential Indian laal dabbas). The first trip was a defining experience. The school was located in a very remote village. Most of our modern low-ground-clearance cars could never tread on those approach roads. The bus came twice a day. There was barely any telephone or mobile-phone network (forget broadband!). Even the electricity supply was intermittent. And in the middle of all this, stood Sevadham’s Tribal Residential School.

After a brief interaction with the faculty, we had a session with the students. The students were initially hesitant and shy but after we spoke, in the local dialect, about games, sports, movies and music – they opened up. The enthusiasm was engaging! We had carried some  audio-video multimedia to introduce the students to technologies like email and Internet.

L to R: The workshop, the school students, me measuring my height, decorated class board

In the first survey visit, we saw their computer lab and spoke to the teachers on how to improve the teaching methodology. They were particularly keen on being able to access the Internet. We noted the things we could do and after an excellent lunch prepared by the school-kitchen, came back to Pune.

Then began our real work. Besides the prohibitively expensive Satellite Internet Access, the only way to bring Internet connectivity to the school was through cellular-data solutions. We approached major telecom carriers of the region and carried their SIM cards and USB-devices on our second trip.

This time around we decided to go without the jeep and use the public transport. And the ride to the school made for as much fun as the activities at the school – everything from an excessively crowded local train to a bus with metal benches and seats (that gave literal shocks due to the simmering heat of the Indian summer) to taking too long to walk from the school to the bus-stop and hence missing the day bus! Unfortunately, after performing a series of tests at the school we realized that unless we raised funds for a satellite-dish based Internet setup, there was little chance of connecting these students to the outside world.

On our subsequent trips to the school and it’s events, we used easily-available resources (such as our laptops, multimedia devices) to conduct some interesting sessions for the school students. While doing this, I was already thinking of the idea of taking the Sevadham school model and applying it to other rural schools around Pune. I had seen how Sevadham had overcome the problems of limited resources and challenging logistics to bring the power of computers to rural students.

Thanks to my Uncle again, I came to know of LAHI (Lend-A-Hand-India) and their ‘PLAN100′ project. As part of the ‘PLAN100′ project, LAHI ran a supplementary school curriculum, called Introduction to Basic Technology (IBT), that attempted to bridge the gap between rural school education and real-world job skills. The existing IBT curriculum did not include a focus on computer training. I approached Sunanda Mane at LAHI with a proposal to enhance their program by including computer education. In parallel, I took to convincing TIBCO to donate used computers as part of a CSR initiative. Both things worked out well and we began the process of planning the pilot program.

The idea was to cover 5/6 schools initially with 9 to 10 computers in each school (3 each for classes 8th, 9th and 10th). We would setup the computer labs, provide initial training to the faculty and formulate a basic syllabus. We would also possibly provide evaluation criteria to the teachers. The schools were chosen based on 2 main criteria. Firstly, if a school had reasonable access to phone and Internet, then we would prefer such a school since  it would allow us to evaluate the full scope of our project. Secondly, if the students at a particular school had easy access and exposure to computers then we would prefer another school where the access was limited.

After a lengthy transfer process, we now have the computers with us and each weekend is spent in a dusty garage trying to assemble functional machines  by combining working parts from different old computers. While doing this, I have come back to my computer engineering basics. When in college, my practical experience was limited to standard hardware problems and issues. But working with a completely unknown set of machines, I now fully understand the beep codes, layouts of different motherboards, mix-and-match combinations of RAM and resolutions to BIOS and CMOS Battery issues! We’ve literally burnt our fingers with wires going short, spent more time planning organization of working and non-working computers than actually organizing them and rejoiced at the sight of a loading operating system following a flicker on the monitor of a completely assembled machine!

L to R: A visibly pleased Suyash with a working computer, the pile up of hardware, Suyash getting his hands dirty on the CPU, sea of monitors and CPUs

At this juncture of LAHI’s ongoing project, I felt compelled to reflect on how the experience has come a full circle. After working for over 3 years in the high-tech computer jargon industry of service-oriented-architecture, business process management and cloud computing – I have come back to the very basics of a computer!

I am aware that this post is going to set my phone ringing with ‘Dude my computer’s down, fix it!’ calls. I am aware that too many weekends are going by  in a boring dark garage. I am aware that a similar amount of time and effort devoted to the stock market could have made me richer.

But at the same time, I am aware that this slightly unconventional effort has been fun, has taught me a lot and has been immensely satisfying.

I want to urge anyone and everyone who reads this post – to take that time and go away from the urban jungle, to take that time and connect to students with addictive energy and passion, to take that time and go back to their field basics and to take that time and do something different.

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* – borrowed from true experiences :)