Lahore and the BCS

I went to Lahore for the BCS because my cousin had been admitted to Punjab College there. He was one semester ahead of me. The college was new enough that it did not have its own hostel, so I lived in shared accommodations and shared bed spaces around the college.

The semester system was the difference.

In the FSC, the system had been annual. You attended classes for two years and then sat one cumulative exam. The exam decided everything. If you were the kind of student I had been in FSC, the system was a slow drift toward the cliff at the end of two years. There was no feedback in the middle. There was no way to know if you had built up to the moment.

The semester system was four-month chunks. Take a course. Sit the exam. Move on. The feedback loop was tight. I could see at the end of every semester whether I had landed or drifted.

In the first semester I scored almost all A grades, with one B. I was first or second in the class. The college had a small batch and I cannot tell you the precise ranking, but I was at the top of it. The boy who had failed three subjects at Multan Public School was not in the room anymore. A different boy was sitting at this desk.

I will tell you what I built in that period that I am proud of, because it tells you something about what was happening to me intellectually.

I wrote a visual calculator in assembly language. The calculator was never quite finished, but the codebase was substantial. It had multiple functions. It compiled. It ran. I do not know if anyone before me at that college had attempted to write a visual calculator in assembly. The professors made polite noises but I think they were also surprised.

I wrote an interpreter that translated Pascal code to Fortran. The interpreter actually worked. You gave it Pascal source and it output Fortran source. The Fortran compiled and produced the same results as the Pascal would have. This was, in retrospect, the kind of project that should have been my master’s thesis years later. I wrote it as an undergraduate.

I tell you this not to brag. I tell you because I want you to feel the distance, again, from the boy in the snooker club to the boy writing a Pascal-to-Fortran interpreter. The distance was eighteen months. The accelerator was the lab and C++ and the absence of the structure that had been failing me. The new structure, this one, was working.

I graduated with a 3.33 GPA, which placed me second in the batch. The batch was small. The score was strong.

My classmates nicknamed me Sai. The word means saint in Punjabi, but the connotation is closer to “the one who is calm and helpful.” It was the opposite of the nicknames I had been given at Razi Public School. I did not engineer the change. I did not even notice when the change had happened. I just noticed, at some point in the BCS years, that nobody was calling me Chacha or Timepiece anymore. The boys around me had decided I was something else.

The BCS years also gave me my first internship and my first job.

The internship was at Systems Research Limited in Rawalpindi. I went there because a classmate of mine, an artist, had taken his own internship there. I admired him. I did not admire him because he was a programmer. I admired him because he was an artist who was also doing the work. I followed him. I cannot recommend this as a methodology. I can tell you that it worked.

After the internship I joined Seesoft in Islamabad as my first real job. I resigned within three or four months and went home to Multan. I was not running away. I was making a decision that did not yet have a structure. I had earned my first salary, six thousand Pakistani rupees, paid on the 30th of August 1999. I gave it to my mother. The amount was modest. The act of giving it to her was the part I remember.

The decision I was about to make was to leave Pakistan.

A friend who lived in Diwan Da Bagh, the same mahalla I had grown up in, told me he had been making good money shuttling between Multan and Dubai. He suggested I try Dubai myself. I said yes. I asked my father to help me arrange the funds for the trip.

I want to pause on that detail.

The man who had slapped me five years earlier, the man who had run out of words during the FSC years, was now the man arranging the funds for my first overseas trip. He did not hesitate. He did not lecture. He arranged the funds.

This is the second great parental act of the memoir, after the newspaper. The first act had given me a path. The second act sent me out into the world to walk it.

The funds were arranged. I got the ticket. I got the visa. The friend who was supposed to come with me told me, three days before the flight, that he would not be able to come.

I went anyway.

I landed in Dubai on the 29th of November, 1999. The next chapter is about that.

I am putting it in the same chapter as the BCS because I want you to feel the structure of how this period worked. The BCS gave me the credential. The internship gave me the experience. The first job gave me the resignation muscle. The friend gave me the idea. The father gave me the funds. The flight gave me the chance.

Five inputs. Five different sources. None of them sufficient on their own. All of them necessary together.

This is a pattern I have seen run, over and over, in the careers of the engineers I have employed. The big move out of the village or the small city or the failed first job is never one input. It is always five. The mistake people make is to wait for one to be perfect. The right move is to start collecting the five.

I had collected the five by November 1999. Read on.