Viren Vaz | Chapter 3 | You Don't Say Much, You Just Say It Constantly
The Unconventional Series
In 2000, Viren graduated from St. Xavier's and took the MCA entrance exam for Pune University. While taking the exam, he wondered where on earth is the maths that Venkat had mentioned was. It was a challenging exam, and he had no idea that preparation was necessary, as there was no exam prep marketing like today. He didn’t qualify for the program.
Through the grapevine, someone suggested doing PGDST (Post Graduate Diploma in Software Technology) at NCST (National Centre for Software Technology). This self-paced course covered AI and Neural Networks, laying the foundation for software programming. It taught coding concepts such as building databases, searching algorithms, and data presentation methods to optimize search speeds.
The entrance exam for this course was well-designed. It gave candidates three hours to complete one of two challenges: write code to produce a specific output from a given input. If the code ran successfully, the candidate passed. Viren found the exam easy because he had been tinkering with coding since the 11th grade.
The program involved understanding theory in class, then programming on computers, and working with student-centric teachers who guided students in figuring out the solutions. In 2001, Viren graduated from the PGDST program. He started applying for jobs but faced rejection because he lacked a bachelor's degree in engineering.
Finally, through his father's referral, he got an interview at IMS, a company conducting classes for competitive exams. He and the hiring manager clicked, and he joined at a salary of ₹8,000. His job involved building a database of question papers. In 2005 he hit a saturation point due to office politics and decided to change job. He joined People's Group as a manager, working on building ‘Fropper,’ similar to Orkut and met his girlfriend on ‘Fropper’ while testing it.
Having lived in Bombay for 27 years, now, he had reached his saturation point with the city. He wanted to experience a different city. His girlfriend was based out of Pune, he saw this as an opportunity to be closer to her and at the same time leave the city. So in 2007, he joined Oracle in Pune.
After a year of dating, they married and settled down. His love for woodwork was reignited by his wife, who gifted him his first power tools and they did the same magic as a good knife does for a cook. Now, the readers might think, why hadn’t our hero yet bought those tools? Afterall, he had the money. Well, our hero has difficulties to spend money on himself. A problem that he is addressing now, and we will learn about it later.
On weekends, he would recharge by working with his power tools, making a bed over eight months, a painting easel for his wife, and a crib for his newborn son. When asked about his process, Viren said, "I had a picture in my mind of the final object and its functionality. I would take some waste wood, build a prototype, learn from my mistakes, and then create the object. The power tools greatly increased my productivity and craftsmanship."
In 2010, a spike in swine flu cases in Pune prompted them to move to Mumbai for six months with their newborn. During this time, cracks began to appear in their relationship. While Viren easily handled the baby, his wife struggled, leading to tension. Looking back, Viren thinks it might have been postpartum depression, but they were unaware due to low awareness at the time. The mental separation has started. Their communication became functional, avoiding discussions about their feelings to prevent confrontations.
With both working, Viren’s parents, who lived nearby, took care of their son, providing significant support. They decided not to move back to Pune, but this decision, based on circumstances and not by will, left Viren feeling stuck in Mumbai. This sense of being trapped flowed to his work, where he felt he didn't belong and wanted to do more with his life.
In 2014, his wife who was always encouraging about his woodwork, bought him a class at the ‘Maker’s Asylum,’ a turning point for Viren. He found his tribe at this place, where people learned and taught to create things with hands. Viren spent every Saturday from 8:30 AM to 10 PM creating woodwork. He soon started teaching woodwork, earning around ₹60,000 per month. Reflecting on this time, Viren recalls, "I had found my community and had a lot of fun. You never knew what would happen next weekend; things were very spontaneous. One day, a guy came on his Royal Enfield, took tools, disassembled the whole bike, cleaned it, and I was like wow, he can do that!"
Despite finding his community, the feeling of being stuck in a city, job, and marriage persisted. He had lost touch with friends and didn't share his feelings with his wife, staying in his comfort zone of being the ideal dad and husband according to societal norms. When asked what held him back, Viren said,
“The messaging came long back and I felt trapped by it. I can't imagine anybody wanting to trap themselves or wanting to hold themselves back because they were born with that need. It has been given to us at some point. So you take a simple advertisement talking about insurance or home loans. It will say a good father should take the insurance for his family’s future to show his love. It's a sweet and simple message that doesn’t say much but it’s been said constantly. This kind of messaging from society trapped me for sure. It held me back. The thought of a solution never came up. See, I could have actually tried to leave to do something different. I could have actually tried to stop being in this marriage. I could have tried to stop being in that job, and stop trying to earn money. All these never occurred to me.”
Viren began to question the notion of earning money. He recalls,
"Everybody keeps saying that you have to earn money, you have to work, you have to work, what can you do otherwise? No one says why do I have to earn money. Leave that no one says ‘how much money I have to earn?’. In my first job, I started with ₹8,000 and in two years was earning ₹30,000. I told a colleague I would push to earn ₹40,000 and then coast. But the goalposts kept moving.”
His job was not only about earning money but also satisfying his curiosity about learning new things in the software world which stopped. Viren never considered that there could be a solution to an unhappy marriage because, in his inner circle - parents, uncles, and aunts with unhappy marriages simply learned to coexist while ignoring the underlying issues. Everyone around him seemed to be going through the motions of life rather than truly living it.
लोग ज़िंदगी जी नहीं रहे, ज़िंदगी काट रहे है |
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If you are new here, please see my previous newsletter for context and the first story. Please click here for Chapter 1 of Viren Vaz.