My first online shopping experience, at the tender age of twelve

I wrote the first draft of this post as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore.

When I was eleven or twelve, a friend at school told me that video games like Age of Empires were built using a language called C. When pressed for details, he had nothing more to tell me. What did he mean by language? Was it like English? How could you use a language to make things move around on the computer screen? He didn’t know. His older brother had informed him about the existence of C and its relationship with video games, but he had inquired no further.

I was desperate to learn C, whatever it was.

Only, I had no idea who to ask or how to go about learning this “language”. I could’ve searched the web, but this was 2002. If I was lucky, I was allowed to use the dial-up for an hour every week. Search engines were bad and my search skills were rudimentary. The web was not yet filled with thousands upon thousands of freely available programming tutorials. And in any case, it was far more important to download the latest Linkin’ Park MP3.

Luckily, Dad knew somebody who worked at the National Institute for Science Communication and Policy Research. They had just published a series of computer education books targeted towards an increasing population of new computer users. My dad had mentioned to him that I was interested in computers, so one day he handed him a giant brown envelope containing two books: a book about the basics of Microsoft PowerPoint, and a slim volume called The C Adventure.

The C Adventure only covered the very basics of C: variables, conditionals, loops, and functions. It didn’t cover structs, pointers, macros, splitting programs into multiple files, build systems, or anything else that would allow me to build the kind of real-world programs I wanted to build. But that didn’t matter. The universe had heard my plea. I finally knew what C was. I could even write a bit of it! They were simple programs that ran in the terminal, but at the time I felt drunk with power. I was one step closer to building Age of Empires.

I could do anything with a computer, anything at all. The only limit was myself.

But The C Adventure wasn’t enough. If I wanted to build games, there was a lot more I’d need to learn: reading and writing files, connecting to the internet, opening windows, rendering 3D graphics, playing sound, writing game AI, and who knew what else. But once again, I didn’t know where to find more learning resources.

The government had come to my aid once, but I couldn’t rely on obscure government departments to come to my aid every time. I had to take matters into my own hands. And I did just that, this time finding my salvation in the free market.

I had no idea where to buy programming books in Delhi, but I reasoned that it might be possible to buy them on the internet. I’d visited American e-commerce websites. Might there be Indian equivalents? I’d seen TV and newspaper ads for a website called Baazee.com. The ads said something about buying and selling. Perhaps this was where I’d find my next C book?

One evening, during my one weekly hour of parentally approved and monitored internet session, I typed Baazee.com into the Internet Explorer 6 URL bar and began my search.

A few minutes of searching led me to a product called “101 Programming eBooks”. It was allegedly a CD containing, well, 101 programming ebooks. The seller had good reviews, and the product description looked compelling so, with an excess of hope, I clicked the buy button.

At the end of the checkout process, the website asked for my credit card details, and that’s where I realized my whole endeavor had been doomed from the very start.

The problem was that my parents didn’t have a credit card at the time, and no amount of convincing on my part would induce them to get one. They’d heard too many horror stories of people getting deep into credit card debt and losing their homes. The newspapers were filled with stories of scams and frauds on the nascent internet, most of which involved stealing people’s credit card details and using them to run up huge bills.

But teenage Ankur needed to learn C. It was a life and death situation, couldn’t they see? I would not allow my parents’ stubborn disapproval of predatory American financial instruments to stand between myself and Age of Empires. So I did what anyone in my place would have done: I begged my Dad to get a credit card, just this once, just for this one purchase. I threw a tantrum. I cried until I ran out of tears.

But nope, it was all in vain. Computers and money were not allowed to mix, not in our household. No credit cards, full stop.

Dejected, I went back to the computer to close all my Internet Explorer 6 windows, when the universe once again chose to smile upon me. The person selling “101 Programming Ebooks” had left their email address on the product description page! Dad urged me to write to them and figure out if we could pay for the CD with cash or cheque.

So I sent an email, and the seller responded with his phone number. He lived in Delhi, not very far from where my family lived. He said we could pick up the CD from his address and pay him in cash. Oh sweet joy! Oh divine providence!

I wanted to go meet the seller myself, and do so immediately. But Dad was more cautious. He first talked to the seller on the phone to make sure he was a real person. He asked him a bunch of questions. When he was satisfied that nothing shady was going on, he went to pick up the CD himself. He might have taken a friend or co-worker with him. He’d read enough scary stories about the internet in the newspapers, and he did not want to appear on page seven or whatever of Times of India.

The seller was just a college kid, still in his early twenties. He was pirating ebooks, burning them to CDs, and selling them online out of his bedroom for some extra cash. My dad was impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit on display, but neither him nor I understood that selling pirated ebooks was illegal. It didn’t matter, though. Everything that had to do with computers and the internet in India was illegal in the 2000s, so nobody cared.

One joyous evening Dad returned home with the CD. It came in an unmarked white paper envelope, with the words “101 Programming Ebooks” scrawled on the disc in permanent marker.

I inserted the disc into the family computer and found it contained exactly what had been advertised: a collection of technical ebooks sorted into directories, mostly published by O’Reilly, in PDF and CHM formats. In fact, there were a lot more than just 101 ebooks in there! My first online purchase had turned out to be incredibly satisfying. The Baazee.com pirate had underpromised and overdelivered.

I spent a lot of time reading the books on that CD. I don’t remember if I ever read any single one of them cover to cover, but I remember dipping in and out of tens of them, picking up something at random whenever the fancy struck me. I remember learning a bit of Perl and writing some simple programs. I remember trying to learn Java but being turned off by public static void main. I remember spending hours reading a book about XML but having no clue why I would want to use it. Could I use it to build Age of Empires? No? Then I didn’t care.

I never ended up building my own version of Age of Empires, but I did go on to use some of the books in the collection to learn and use C (and some C++) profitably for many small projects. Later, when I was in college I even learned some Objective-C, and made a bit of money building an iPad game for a small marketing agency. So technically I’ve been paid to build a video game, and technically some part of it was built with C. Success? Let’s call it a success.

While no single book on the “101 Programming Ebooks” CD changed my life, the collection gave me a vast buffet of tools and technologies to sample from. It expanded my mind and allowed me to see the full spectrum of possibilities in a computer career. Looking back at that event 23 years later, the only book I can remember clearly is the Camel Book, but I’m sure there were many more in that collection that I used to occupy slow evenings.

I sometimes wonder where that college kid is now, the one who was selling pirated ebooks out of his bedroom. Did he go on to start his own tech company? Did he move to America, as so many people in tech do? Or does he still live somewhere in Delhi, ripping Hindi TV shows off Amazon Prime and helping people jailbreak their Nintendo Switches?

Wherever he is, I hope he’s done well for himself. I am forever grateful for “101 Programming Ebooks” and the wild-west internet of the 2000s.