Hitting Refresh With Technology – Evolving Times and Self-Independence

The 1960s was dawning to a widespread pandemonium of Rock & Roll music in Great Britain, en-Cashing the Elvis Ghetto and Perkins’ Blue Suede shoes into forever memorable great balls of fire. The Beatles kicked off this decade with their trip to Hamburg, Germany where they caught glimpse of Ringo Starr for the 1st time. Within 2 years, in 1962, they Hit Refreshed their drum section by bringing in Ringo, in place of Pete Best. The next 8 years triggered a major cultural renaissance as I see it. The recording storage industry also transcended from Vinyl to Compact Cassette and later to Compact Disc (CD) by the early 1980s. This was the time when Abba’s ‘The Visitors’ technically edged out Billy Joel’s ‘52nd Street’ for being the 1st music album to be recorded on a CD. Closer to this time, a little later in the decade, I was trying to read printed books with large fonts with the help of single-sided thick-glass spectacles.

The early Years

Born in the year that brought glory to the Argentina football team and the launch of ‘Graceland’ (the 7th studio album by Paul Simon); I was keeping up with my initial learning curve of English alphabets, Tamil voices and a little gibberish here and there in Hindi for the rest of 1980s and early 1990s. The field of medicine was unknown to me, but I just felt that the learning curve of the doctors to go from Nystagmus (AKA Dancing Eyes) to Macular Degeneration as the diagnosis of my vision problem took anywhere between 3 Cricket World Cups, 4, may be 5 Indian Prime Ministers and a ton of solar and lunar eclipses. I kept losing the edge with dark letters/fonts while reading, dark lines drawn on sheets of paper to keep up my writing trail in a straight line, and as I hit the 21st century riding my cycle/bike on the streets of Bombay. The rest of the 80s zipped through a regular routine, with more hopes continuing to mount on the following decade.

The early years of my education was layered with human ingenuity, with my mother and I running through the learning material verbally. In today’s day of YouTube entertainment, they call it epic rap battles. Just that, it was never epic, not animated, way slower and most civilized. I was enrolled in an integrated school (not a special school for the blind) and it was a wonderful time for all of us, teachers, special educators, my parents and myself to learn newer ways to undergo the same curriculum. As I hit my 5th grade, 3 things happened:

1.      I couldn’t write my own test papers.

2.      I had an opportunity to learn Braille, I gave it a pass.

3.      My mother started recording the lessons on Compact cassettes.

This resulted in optimum utilization of time, better grades, more physical storage and the last-minute rush to find readers and writers for examination. Cassettes were party to my 1st date with technology, beyond television and other electrical appliances. This was at a time when they were going down the popularity ladder and CDs were seeing shades of innovation. I’d kept 1 thing away from technology for a long time, which is practicing math problems and later during my college years, accounting calculations. I never ended up using talking calculators, Microsoft Excel during my school and college years. It’s another segment of human learning and intelligence, this time between myself and my father.

The Turn of the Century

The early 2000s got me learning computers and for the 1st time, I looked at its usage beyond downloading and streaming music. I also had my 1st encounter with screen readers and got myself trained on Microsoft Office applications, internet and allied using JAWS, from a Bombay based institution Voice Vision. During my graduation days, cassettes gave way to the HP 3770 scanner, and Microsoft Word. I, and at times my family, would scan the books and save it in MS word, post which I would read them through with the help of JAWS. Physical storage gave way to virtual storage on hard-discs. JAWS opened learning opportunities beyond my immediate scope of education. I started reading books beyond counts, opinions and editorials to no measure, write perspectives and poetry, and initiate my way into the world of social media.

MBA – Minding my Business, Absolutely

I could have been a law or an advertising/journalism double graduate beyond just commerce but turned into an accidental MBA. This was towards the end of the 1st decade in the new millennium and I took an entrance test for kicks, but ended up clocking the numbers to get into one of the top 10 business schools in India, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies. Hard-copies of learning material was still in high circulation, but the internet was my parallel universe. A lot of my research material, reference books and white papers were available in soft-copies and quite a few of them in accessible formats. During this time my usage of Microsoft PowerPoint saw its dawn and I started learning it myself from the scratch, a few days before my 1st presentation during my summer internship. Nothing other than ‘marketing’ made an obvious go-to and my preferred choice of specialization. It came with its own set of outward-in perceptions and intrinsic yet interesting challenges.

Keeping it Real

My 1st job post MBA was into the field of online marketing, something that was still alien as a profile offered to marketing graduates. I learnt the building blocks of SMM, SEM, SEO, PPC, product development and management alongside picking up various organizational behavioral traits. Towards the end of 2012, I came across an opportunity to work within the digital marketing team at Microsoft India and was hired by Aparna Lal. It was 5 years ago and there’s been no turning back. I currently lead the social media practice for Microsoft in India alongside the network of owned digital assets and customer story telling. I continue to advocate the use of alternative text or image descriptors when I work with my agency partners to get a better grip of images and creatives. HTML5 inching out flash, AI capabilities driving real significance and the growing popularity of digital assistants; they are all really encouraging as we steer through this mobile-1st world.

Marching On

The past 8 years have seen 3 moments that continues to complement my quest to continuously learn and evolve:

·      My 1st iPhone purchase back in the August of 2014 that fused mobility with accessibility for me.

·      The installation of the Kindle app that helps me to continuously hit refresh to my work routine when I’m on the go.

·      The launch of the Seeing AI app back in 2017 that will continue to take care of what I call ‘visual logistics’ – somethings that are basic and now can be done without dependence.

When I look back, I’m truly amazed at the power of

·      a diversely qualified family – I often say ‘my mother is one of the most qualified women out there’ for her sheer dedication to my education. But it’s the power of 1 family that continues to evolve me and our collective. Between the 5 of us (Me, my parents, Brother and my wife), we cover Economics to History, Political Science to accounting and public policy, Marketing to special education.

·      applications and real logics simulated in the virtual world that continues to drive human evolution.

·      Collaboration with people across the world thanks to tools and technologies beyond boundaries.

As we continue to see the magic of the machines as they try to interpret what we say; sense the actions we could take; make us too lazy to make decisions; we collectively need to evolve to keep up as humans as the show must go on. I still carry my deepest gratitude to the single keystroke ‘F5’ because it keeps the hope alive for the status quo to change and that thrill is never going away.