When I am 64 (India)

I was in India earlier this month during a house move. Sorting through odds and ends, figuring out stuff to throw away, I came across  my first computer - a Commodore 64.

A felt a sudden rush of memories. Bombay in the late 1980s: almost every night we watched horror movies at our neighbors’ followed by coding games on the Commodore 64. We were about half a decade late compared to the West but we still enjoyed making things come alive on this computer. Late at night, we would climb onto an unsecured ledge of our apartment block roof and ponder about what the future would bring.

I cleaned up the Commodore 64  and connected it to power and a  TV half expecting it to explode. It still worked! In the early ’90s, my brother and I ran a small advertising firm using a Sinclair Spectrum computer. We capitalized on cable TV boom by creating short animated ads for local businesses, which we then distributed through cable operators.

In the mid-1990s, I co-founded “White Noise,” a local paper focused on technology and personal development. We used a Macintosh computer at the publisher’s office to design the magazine layout. Later that year, I joined a startup that created  multimedia content - transitioning from a programmer to an instructional designer.  

These days, I design games for mobile devices. Some aspects resemble programming on the Commodore due to its limited 64K memory. Efficient coding was essential for optimal performance.