By the end of 2002, in the third year of his programme, Sachin had become addicted to computer games. While many students would spend hours on these games daily, Sachin’s addiction was more serious. He was also very good at gaming, which was why the anagram game had rankled. Students regularly played two games in particular – Age of Empires and Quake. Quake required expert hand-eye coordination while Age of Empires was a strategy game, testing the player’s ability to plan their moves in a shrewd, tactical manner and allocate resources efficiently. Sachin was among the few who excelled at both games. He was almost unbeatable at Quake. His hostelmates frequently heard his shouts at the end of a session – ‘Killed it!’ – late in the night as he celebrated his latest victory.
Ram Singla, one of Sachin’s hostelmates at Jwala and a fellow involuntary member of the CCA, would lose to Sachin every time, often within seconds. Ram would ask Sachin, ‘What’s the point, man? Why are you even playing with me?’
‘Koi aur hai nahi. Tu hi khel le,’ Sachin would say. (There’s no one else around. So, I have to make do with you.)
In 2003, Sachin and three of his hostelmates, Harsh Dhand, Ankit Agarwal and Pankaj Garg, were selected for a two-and-a-half-month research internship at the University of Essen in Germany. The city of Essen lies on Germany’s border with Belgium and the Netherlands. For the four young men, the internship turned into a pleasure trip. On a university-allocated budget of €1,500 each, they embarked on a Europe trip, visiting more than a dozen countries including France, Italy and Spain. In the early 2000s, very few young Indians had the means or the opportunity to travel to the West. It wouldn’t be surprising if this trip had stirred and broadened Sachin’s imagination to some extent.
Although, on returning in the summer of 2003 for his fourth and final year at IIT Delhi, Sachin quickly resumed his manic gaming. He was possessed by video games. His friends speculated that he sometimes leftexams early just so he could return to his games. He had lost interest in the programme, and a few months into his final year, it became clear that he wasn’t going to pass – a calamitous outcome. Getting into an IIT is considered a momentous, life-changing event. But this is based on the assumption that one will obtain the degree that fetches the big jobs. It was a reasonable assumption – most students attained passing grades without great difficulty.
Sachin, however, was so consumed by video games that he considered quitting IIT altogether to take up gaming professionally. It was an absurd plan. IITians are known to rave about the excellence of their education, but it is often only later in life. It isn’t necessarily for the quality of the institute’s education or for intellectual enrichment that multitudes of aspiring young Indians seek admission into the IITs. The higher goal, for both the aspirants and their parents, is for the former to obtain the best-paying jobs and ward off a proverbial life on the streets. In the early years of the new millennium, dropping out just wasn’t considered acceptable.
But Sachin didn’t care. He informed his friends of his latest accomplishment – he had apparently clinched one of the highest ranks in a national gaming competition. The aim was to win the next time. Only at the end of his fourth year at IIT, as he watched his classmates land jobs at marquee companies like McKinsey and Microsoft or move abroad for post-graduate studies, did Sachin change track and vow to get his degree. Like a chain smoker quitting determinedly, he withdrew himself from gaming.
Over the next year, Sachin experienced the humiliation of staying behind for an additional year. He worked diligently, spending hours at the computer lab rather than thinking of ways to improve his gaming scores. He finished his final-year research project, completed the mandatory courses and finally secured his degree. In July 2005, he joined the small Indian software firm Techspan in Bangalore. It was hardly a dream job, but at least he wasn’t killing it or getting killed by video game characters. And he wasn’t out on the streets either.
Outside IIT campuses, Sachin may have come across as an extreme character, unusually passionate, an eccentric who would consider giving up an IIT degree for gaming. But not at the IITs, where students like Sachin were hardly uncommon. As Ram Singla succinctly puts it, ‘There’s another guy [bestselling paperback writer Chetan Bhagat] from IIT who wrote a book called Five Point Someone.5 He could’ve been describing Sachin.’
THERE WAS NOTHING eccentric about Binny Bansal. He truly was a regular campus guy.
Binny joined the computer science programme in 2001, one year after Sachin. He was a ‘full toss’, securing admission in the first attempt. His classmates included Rohit Bansal, who would go on to launch Snapdeal, Flipkart’s arch-rival for many years. Binny and Rohit were ‘best buddies’6 in their first year at IIT but they drifted apart after that. Their class came to be notorious for low attendance and relatively poor grades. Their seniors would scoff at them. ‘Tum log yahaan kahaan se aa gaye?’ How did you guys end up here?
The four years Binny spent at IIT Delhi passed satisfactorily. He was overall a bright student, even though his grades slipped in later years. He played sports – basketball and squash were his favourites. Despite being introverted and a tad socially awkward, like the stereotypical Indian software engineer, Binny had a
