The COVID Era
- I was 9 years old. The world shut down. And somehow, that shutdown built the foundation for everything I do today.
The Lockdown Life
School went online. It was an experience. On one hand, you could attend class in pyjamas. On the other hand, you learned absolutely nothing and the WiFi always cut out at the worst possible moment. The structure of daily life -- wake up, go to school, come home, see friends -- collapsed into a formless blob of screen time.
For a 9-year-old, lockdown was equal parts boring and free. There was nowhere to go, nobody to see in person, and an infinite amount of time to fill. That combination -- boredom plus freedom -- turns out to be the most productive combination possible for a kid with curiosity.
Fortnite Sessions
Gaming became everything. Specifically, Fortnite with Vivaan M. When you cannot go outside, cannot see your friends, and school is just a Zoom call, gaming becomes your entire social life. We played an insane amount. The wins, the losses, the rage quits, and the "one more game" that turned into four more hours.
Gaming during COVID was not just entertainment -- it was socialisation. Those Fortnite sessions were how I stayed connected to friends when every other form of connection was cut off. The voice chat was the hallway. The squad was the friend group. The victory royale was the thing you talked about the next day on Zoom.
The Question
Here is where lockdown stops being a sad story and becomes an origin story. In the middle of all that gaming, a question emerged: "How are these games made?"
Not a profound philosophical question. Just a kid wondering how the thing on his screen works. I asked my parents. They said coding. They enrolled me at MindChamp. I started with Scratch -- block coding, drag and drop. And that was it. That was the moment.
The pandemic gave me two things no normal year would have: unlimited free time and the specific kind of boredom that makes you ask questions about how things work. Without COVID, I probably keep gaming and never wonder about the code behind the games. Without the boredom, I never ask the question. Without the question, there is no coding, no Python, no Buildspace, no LockIn, no any of it.
Online School
Online school deserves its own mention because it was its own experience. Teachers trying to figure out Zoom. Students with cameras off. The kid who forgot to mute and whose entire family became part of the class. The WiFi dropping during a test. The complete inability to concentrate when your bedroom is also your classroom.
But it freed up time. Time that went into gaming first, and then into coding. The inefficiency of online school became an accidental gift -- it gave me hours that would have been spent commuting, socialising, and sitting in a physical classroom, and redirected them toward the screen where I was learning to build.
The Era That Made Me
I would not want to go through it again. Nobody would. But I am grateful for what it produced. COVID lockdown stripped away everything except me and my interests, and I discovered that my deepest interest was making things. Not consuming them -- making them. That discovery, born from the specific boredom of a 9-year-old stuck at home during a global pandemic, is the single most important thing that has ever happened to my career.
The era was lonely, weird, and unprecedented. It was also the era that made me a builder.