Started the schooling at Date palms and then moved to St. Anthony's Highschool,
but fast forwarding to the stuff that matters:joining Shantiniketan Vidyalaya :)
Picked up drawing as a kid and Loved it.
Used to participate in painting competitions frequently and won many prizes.
A Huge one could be the National Level painting competition in the 3rd grade:D
Was first introduced to computers with LOGO , Microsoft Paint and
Microsoft Powerpoint in 1999, but picked up the cooler stuff Starting with
Macromedia Flash only after joining Shantiniketan Vidyalaya.

Was initially obsessed with the question

"How do they create Dexter's Laboratory?"...

Until I found out about the magic tool they use at My Uncle's Software company!
The 8th grade: They promised us Western Music classes in school and lol, I was
the only kid in the whole school who took a keyboard to the boarding school.
(a small Casio PT-120 - which later got roasted in one of the geeky experiments)

Eventually they cancelled the classes because no one else except 3 of us were
interested in the instrumental music. But I guess, being interested is more than
enough sometimes :)

Oh and finally got a Yamaha PSR 290 as a New year's gift in the 9th Grade -
probably the best gift ever!!
Finally the dreadful 11th and 12th Grade. A horrible/horrifying boarding school.
(More like what most people call a Concentration Camp for the rat race of
Entrance exams)

If there were somethings i ve learned about myself: out here, they probably were
that I loved solving Physics Problems. enjoyed Math and puzzles. hated Chemistry.

Oh and yes took up French as a Third language. Loved the language for whatever
classes we had.(well the concentration camp used to hire the french teachers
only a month prior to the external examinations. So didnt get to learn much of
the language, but i think i liked whatever i have learnt : Bon Jour :D )
Whatever little holidays we had, all i remember doing was googling for software
on How to Record Music like they do in Studios.

And finally found the awesome software that i still kinda love.
1) Noteworth Composer - A Midi Notation Software.

After being the well known(among my friends) ringtone composer I was, at that time,
i thought it was time i ve moved onto bigger things. Try saving the monophonic
ringtones I have made into full fledged instrumental songs and this was the first
thing I have found. Was a total show off for making the computer play music , and
writing the Music Notation that I still cant read (LOL@ Trial and Error).

2) Audacity - The best Free Multitrack Audio editor I have ever found.
Making midi files was fun. But I needed to record what i played with my
*shiny Yamaha PSR 290.

Hence I took a couple of broken headphones and made a 2 sided TRS connector
and routed My Keyboard's Headphone output to My Computer's Microphone Input.
And then found Audacity. Even learnt what Waltz means and made my first music
piece: My Waltz :D

Oh and for a brief i tried to "Remix" the songs on the TV , alongside my own
stuff from my keyboard into Casette tapes :)
Well, this is what I have achieved at the end of a 2 year long rat race.
I still dont think the concentration camp was worth it. But, I guess, this is
something I have to be proud of - after all, they are National level competitive
exams which I worked quite hard for.
Finally got into a nice college. (The rat race paid off, i guess...)
A college that could get me as closer to computers as possible, without
worrying much about nightmarish courses like Biology or Chemistry or what not!
College - taught me the most important technical concepts i have ever learnt.

Computer Organization and Programming was probably _The Best_ course ever.
I finally understood what they mean by computer runs on 1s and 0s.
Programmed the LC3 (in assembly) to sort an array of numbers. Finally understood
how every piece fits together in the puzzle. Was introduced to C.

Was always guilty that i should have started programming a bit earlier. Hence,
have decided to make a Minesweeper in C. Although it basically ran on printf and
scanf , and wasn't shiny at all.. I was so obsessed with clearing the nearby
mines if the clicked button didnt have any mines, that it took me a couple of
days to figure out the magic of recurssion! :D

Tried bigger things with C++ though.. but lost interest in most of them midway.
Like Trying to make a Chess game, trying to compress strings etc...
(Oh and was totally amazed with Huffman coding in the semester
with Data structures!)

Oh and another awesome gift for my college time: Dad's N70!! Was always a
mobile freak, but i guess, the N70 really took it to a new level. The free
GPRS hacks, programming "FLAMES" on Ped on the N70 during a boring C++ lecture
to learn Python.... I guess that just was tooooo damn awesome!

Lol the multitasking in the N70 still beats the iPhone. Had the Python tutorial
on Opera Mini (well the free internet hack! ;) ) and was coding in Ped for S60!

:D
Sometimes you simply can't avoid things that waste your time.
And this definitely was one of those times, where I just wanted to be more
productive,just so that I can make my point. But again, I still am proud of
this achievement :D

Took me a while to get started though!
The Summer after the second year in college: Took up an Internship
at a small company nearby: Maramsoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Implemented a small
project in VB.NET, got bored and never looked back at it!
The computer graphics course we had was quite fun :)
Was Quite excited to make an 8bit looking world in 3D using only cubes.
Pardia did quite a good job in making the models for the project :)
I guess this is the first project that actually showed me the need for a
Version Control System too! :)
After fixing my worn out Keyboard so many times to win the Music competition,I
bought myself a Bansuri - The Indian Flute. with the Prize Money I have gotten
for my first composition in College : We called it Freshface(probably became my
signature tune at college :D ) :)

I guess, it was time to broaden my Musical Horizons :)
It was the end of the summer holidays after the 2nd year at college and
After the horrible internship experience, I thought it would have been a
complete waste of time, if I haven't made anything worthwhile during the
holidays.

Hence the little experiment. Made the remix , mostly in the trial version
of FLStudio...Ah yes.. another DAW i picked up quite a while ago...
Finally the Third Year in College: Picked the Computer Graphics course,
which i think i still am quite interested in.

Introduction to Algorithms: Probably most disappoining course in college - We
did nothing but sorting and searching till half of the semester.

On the other hand, the non technical electives from this year were really
amazing!!! Prof. Harmony Siganporia and Prof. Binita Desai, both of them
were just too amazing!
We started this student club in my Third year at College.
The number of people who were interested in attending the sessions were
quite small though.. about 7-10?(from an ICT college of about 1000 people!)
Aha ! My First Google Summer of Code. Took me a lot of effort to get into.
(unsupportive "friends" being the core of the problems).

This definitely was my first BIG project I have ever worked on. Took me a while
to get used to the code base. Took me even longer to understand the concepts of
the horrifying Build System: Autotools! But at the end of the Internship, I have
managed to fix the Akonadi Backend of Syncevolution. Hehe, took me a month
longer to clean up the mess I have created to get the patches merged in the
upstream though.
My first real world Software development experience. Gained a lot of insight
into how the C++ i ve learnt in college, fits in Real world Software.

It was quite a challenging 3 months of my life. :)
Thanks to my first big internship: I had to learn all these things over the
summer. Although I do admit that most of what I have learnt at this point was
just a hackish knowledge to get the work done. (Especially Autotools!!!)

And lol @ the IDEs. I tried *hard* to use IDEs, but really couldn't use them
during the GSoC though. Ended up using a text editor and a terminal for
everything.

But if there is one thing i became comfortable with, because of the Internship,
it was to the IDE of using Git!
The Final year at college. Wasnt as exciting as i thought it would be.
Introduction to Information Retrieval was quite a good course though :)
Everything else was just repetition from previous courses. I must say
that college education didn't really excite me as much as it should in the
final year.