Before Apnipathshala: The Computer I Was Too Scared to Learn

The Beginning — Part 1 of the Apnipathshala origin story

Four years ago, in 2021-22, I had no idea I was about to start anything. I was just a second-year biotechnology student at a tier-three, maybe tier-four college, with zero clarity about my future and even less about computers.

I want to start there not with a mission statement, but with a kid who couldn’t use a mouse.

The Only Teacher Who Cared

I’d been teaching since class ten. Local tuition centers, coaching classes I had a knack for storytelling, and somehow that translated into a real bond with the kids I taught. It was the one thing in my life that felt effortless.

Everything else felt like drift. I was pursuing biotechnology mostly because that’s where I’d ended up, not because of any burning interest and whatever interest I did have got wiped out during the pandemic’s online classes. I was a fairly typical lower-middle-class student: no vision, no plan, promising myself every semester that agle semester mein toh fod doonga next semester I’ll absolutely smash it. I never did, not in the way I meant it.

The one constant in this mess was Girish sir, a mentor of mine. Most of my professors were focused on finishing the syllabusand getting out of the classroom. Girish sir was the only one who seemed to actually care what I learned. He had one refrain, repeated endlessly, never explained: “Go learn some skill.”

Which skill? He never said. Computers, marketing, communication he left it open. It didn’t matter to him which door I walked through. It mattered that I walked through one.

Growing Up Without Touching a Computer

Here’s a fact about me that still surprises people: I reached the second year of my biotechnology degree having never used a computer.

Not “used one rarely.” Never.

My school was the kind where the computer lab was treated like a temple we took our shoes off before entering. One computer, shared across a batch of twenty-five to thirty students, and a class that happened maybe once a month. The teacher would point: this is the monitor, this is the keyboard, this is the mouse. For anything practical how Microsoft Word actually worked she’d draw the toolbar on the blackboard. Insert button here, format menu there. That was the entire computer education.

I was curious about computers anyway. Genuinely curious, the way you’re curious about something just out of reach. But the local computer courses in my area cost ten to fifteen thousand rupees for three to six months, and I was never able to ask my father for that kind of money. Not because he’d have said no because of what would happen if I said yes and then failed to actually learn anything. At that age, I already understood something most people take years to learn: a certificate was not the same thing as learning. I wasn’t afraid of spending themoney. I was afraid of spending it and having nothing to show for it except a piece of paper.

So I never asked. No personal computer at home. Nobody in my family used one. That was just the shape of my life.

A Five-Minute Walk From Home

The break came through a friend from college, Himani. She mentioned, almost in passing, that her father a man I’ve always called Sarate sir ran an NGO called the Narayan Chandra Trust (NCT), and that they were piloting a computer class. I’d never heard of the place. It turned out to be a fiveminute walk from my house, which tells you how small my world was at the time: college, home, repeat. I never wandered.

Himani knew my situation the interest, the money problem, all of it and she invited me in. The terms were simple: the class itself was free. If you wanted a certificate at the end, that was five hundred rupees.

I didn’t need to think twice. Who needed a certificate? I wanted the skill.

Learning to Hold a Mouse

I still remember my first day. The teacher was a young guy I admired almost instantly, and he started us absolute beginners, several of us who’d never touched a keyboard on WordPress. Building an actual website. I couldn’t hold a mouse properly. Typing felt like a distant, advanced skill I’d get to eventually.

I had a close friend in that batch, Sai, who was genuinely good with computers, and I leaned on him constantly every drag, every click, every “am I doing this right?” He never once made me feel small for asking. I was, by any honest measure, pathetic at it in the beginning. But something in me call it stubbornness, call it hunger meant I caught up in two, three weeks.

The Boat in the Middle of the Sea

Two months in, our teacher left, for reasons that were never fully explained to us. Just like that, about a hundred and twenty students all of us mid-lesson, mid-skill, mid-momentum were left with no one steering. A boat in the middle of the sea.

You already know how this story bends from here, even if you don’t know the details yet: Pankaj sir and Sarate sir stepped in from within the Trust to keep things running. And because I’d been proactiv because I’d already spent two months asking questions, helping the friend next to me, staying past when I needed to I slid into something closer to a teacher’s role. In a classroom full of kids roughly my own age, I was the one explaining computers and basic coding.

The irony isn’t lost on me. Four months earlier, I hadn’t known what a mouse was for. Now I was teaching it.

That shift from student to something like a teacher, in three or four months flat is where this story actually begins. Not with a business plan. Not with a mission statement about education equity. With a kid who couldn’t afford fifteen thousand rupees, and a free class five minutes from his house.

This is Chapter One. There’s more how Girish sir and I actually met, what happened inside that Trust next, and how acomputer class turned into something much bigger. That’s for the next part.