I forgot to tell you something. When I was in middle school, we got our first mobile phone, a Nokia 2626, around 2009-2010. My mobile was GPRS enabled, allowing us to access the internet, although it took about two minutes to load a very basic internet page. The cost was around 1 rupee for 100 KB, and we used to buy a 20 MB pack for 5 rupees, valid for three days, all on 2G data. That’s when I started my internet journey. I downloaded Opera Mini and UC Browser, began exploring the internet, created a Gmail account, and signed up for Facebook. I felt like I knew a lot about the internet.
I used to lecture everyone in my school about technology, especially about the internet. My friends Goutam, Salman, and I would call, message, and discuss everything about Gmail, social media, how to download songs, and where to find “Sunday Suspense” and soo on. One day, in my 10th grade, Salman told me he had built his own website. That single sentence changed my life. That day, I searched for how to build a website from my mobile and found a few resources, including wapka.mobi. I created an account and started exploring how to have my own website. That night, I created my very first website, which was something like rajasardar.wapka.mobi.
From there, I searched Google for how to make text bold, how to add color, how to animate it, how to italicize text, and what a link is, all through Google searches. Over the next two years, I built multiple websites using wapka.mobi’s inbuilt builder and a few codes, one of which was greenmusic.wapka.mobi, a fully functional website. Then, I started thinking about how to build a desktop website and began learning about domain names, web hosting, coding languages, servers, and more.
I had a diary inherited from a fraud caught by my uncle a few years ago, where I started writing my thoughts from 10th grade. From that time, I dreamed of a dystopian digital education system and noted down how it should be, which led me to think about what else we could do with these technologies. I began dreaming up many ideas and noted them down in that diary and a few more notebooks. I researched domain names and checked on GoDaddy.com to see if they were available.
When I was in 11th grade, all these internet and e-commerce companies started booming. The very first domain I bought from GoDaddy was priceraj.com, so I could create a website for comparing prices of products from different websites.
Throughout this journey, I always thought I would pursue a degree in Mathematics, as it was my lifelong dream. However, due to personal reasons, I dropped out of my higher secondary final exam (12th grade). After that, my father bought me a guitar and a desktop computer in 2013-2014. I built priceraj.com as a fully functional price comparison website, but only the front end without any backend logic. I identified gaps in how to make it functional, how to implement logic, and how to make it user ready, which led me to learn more about computers and the internet.
I started taking programming tuition in C language from a local computer teacher. Knowing that even though I would become a mathematician, I still wanted to build something using technology that would impact society.