Cold Feet and Varun Agarwal

While going through my daily quora digest, I came across an answer citing a Varun Agarwal quote. That actually triggered me into a routine, which I usually follow when I get interested in a  personality.

• Read their Wikipedia bio
• Find their personal website and check their contacts (I’ve never reached out to any of them, still I do check for ways to get in touch)
• Watch their interviews/speeches in Youtube
• Look for similarities between our lives/thoughts/speech pattern (and many other silly things)
• Get impressed and inspired all over again

But in the case of Varun Agarwal, my routine took a different course. I did go through his profile and personal website :p. In addition, it triggered memories of my college days - when and how he became my source of inspiration, eventually resulting in this blog post.

Balaji and me had this habit of taking part in as many paper presentations as possible, mostly to escape our boring college lectures. We easily got permissions thanks to our good track record of winning prizes in most of the ones we participated. And a secret – our track record actually was even more impressive than what everyone knew. We won prizes in almost everywhere we presented and when we didn’t win, it mostly meant that we didn’t present at all!

It was one such symposium where we both had cold feet moments before the presentation and decided to take part in other events instead. This chickening out was not new to us. Those times, we would just enjoy going around the college, looking at beautifully dressed girls, taking part in fun activities and come back with participation certificates and an awesome feeling of a day well spent outside our college(with attendance :p).

One of the other competitions that day was Animation. We registered ourselves not knowing what to expect. Although I had knowledge of Adobe Flash and 3ds Max, I was not sure of the rules of the contest. First round was simple – we were asked to design a poster in Photoshop with the given clipart elements. It was a piece of cake. The reviewer couldn’t believe that what we did was done only with the given elements and native effects. We easily got into the second round.

The second round was an actual animation contest. We were asked to create an animation explaining the queue data structure(it was a computer science symposium). In spite of my experience in flash animations, I couldn’t create anything impressive. I had some coloured balls moving here and there showing the enqueue and dequeue process. Even I wasn’t satisfied with what I made. Naturally, we weren’t the winners.

In college days, life was very simple. Winners were not the only ones who had it all. Every participant got certificates. Sometimes we were lucky enough to get consolation prizes too. That was one such lucky moment and we got consolation prizes in the animation contest. Our prizes were two books – a romantic novel by Durjoy Datta and another book with a pic of some weird cartoonish auntie in the cover.

After a week or so when I was completely bored, that weird auntie book caught my attention and I started reading it. That’s how I got introduced to Varun Agarwal and it was his autobiography – “How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company”. Following it, I watched one of his speeches in YouTube, which again inspired me a lot into pursuing my dreams.

Being in Bangalore for over 2 years, whenever I’m at Koramangala or I cross the Bishop Cotton school, I’m always reminded of this young guy who managed to live his dreams. Although it doesn’t discuss any business strategy or deal with the technicalities of being successful in a business, I’d always suggest the book that introduced me this guy to every entrepreneur out there.