The internet in 2001 made a sound.
It was a sequence — a series of tones and static and electronic negotiation, a machine talking to another machine across a phone line, both of them working out the terms of a connection that was about to temporarily join two points in the world that were otherwise separate. The sound lasted fifteen or twenty seconds. Then it stopped. And in the silence after it stopped, if the connection had succeeded, you were online.
I heard that sound hundreds of times in the years I was building Fusion Technologies. Each time, there was a fraction of a second between the silence and the screen loading where you held something — not quite breath, not quite hope, but something in the vicinity of both — waiting to see if the world had connected or if you would have to start the sequence again.
This feeling — of having built something, sent it out into an infrastructure that was unreliable and new and not yet fully trusted, and waiting to see if it arrived — turned out to be a very accurate metaphor for the entire enterprise.
I had moved from Hubli to Bangalore carrying what the screen printing years had given me: the knowledge that a gap between what technology could do and what most people were doing with it was an invitation, not just an observation. Bangalore in 2001 was full of these gaps. The city was becoming something — you could feel it in the new buildings going up, the companies arriving, the particular energy of a place that had been chosen by the future and was still absorbing the surprise of that choice.
Fusion Technologies was co-founded with a small group of people who were not, I should say honestly, very technology-savvy or particularly communicative about what we were building. This meant that the company's face — the person who explained the technology, made the pitch, handled the sales, designed the communication, stood in the room and made the case — was me. I was not the coder. We had someone for that. I was the architect of the idea, the salesman for the product, the person who translated what we had built into language that a school principal or a parent or an administrator could understand and want.
This is a role I have played in every organisation since. Not the person who writes the code but the person who understands it deeply enough to explain why it matters — who can sit across from a decision-maker and make the invisible visible. I didn't choose this role in Fusion Technologies. It chose me, because nobody else was available to fill it. But it fit so naturally that I have worn it ever since.
The first school was BGS International.
BGS was not a small institution. It had the backing of a Swamiji — a religious and community figure of significant standing — which meant it carried both institutional credibility and a particular kind of cultural weight in Bangalore. Getting a meeting with the principal was one thing. The principal, once we had explained what we were building, wanted to take us further — to introduce us to the larger entity behind the school, the person whose approval or interest could potentially open doors across multiple institutions simultaneously.
This meant waiting.
Another Brick in the Wall was playing somewhere in my head that afternoon. Not as teenage rebellion against authority — I was past that, or at least I told myself I was. As something more specific: the sound of someone who walks into an institution without being diminished by it. We don't need no thought control. There is a version of that corridor — the waiting area of a significant school, backed by a significant figure, full of people who had come from various parts of public life to seek an audience — that produces a particular kind of intimidation. The architecture of importance designed to make you feel small before you've said a word.
I didn't feel small. I felt aware.
I want to be precise about the distinction because it matters. Aware of the surroundings, yes — the scale of the institution, the distance between the world I had come from and the world I was trying to enter, the number of people in that corridor who were senior to me in age and experience and social standing. I registered all of this clearly. But underneath the awareness was something that the awareness could not touch: the knowledge that I had something they needed. That the technology I was about to describe did not yet exist in their world. That I had come to offer them the future and they had not yet understood that the future was in the room.
We were not intimidated by the building. We had something they needed. Those are different things, and the difference matters.
The meeting happened. I explained the product — the database, the data entry process, the dial-up connection, the school records appearing on a screen anywhere in the world. The principal understood it. Was interested. Saw what it could mean for the school's positioning — not primarily as a service to parents, I noticed, but as a signal. We are a school that is technologically advanced. We are a school that parents abroad will choose because we offer what others don't yet.
This was the insight that unlocked the sales process. We were not, in the end, selling convenience to parents. We were selling modernity to schools. The parent was the beneficiary. The school was the customer. And what the school was buying was the right to say: we understood the future before our competitors did.
I adjusted the pitch accordingly. We sold to six or seven schools.
The process of making it work was less glamorous than the idea of it, which is true of most things.
Each school needed someone to do the data entry. A person — usually a young man, sometimes a student helper, sometimes a dedicated admin staff member — who would take the attendance registers and the marks cards and the report cards, sit at a computer, and enter the information into our system so that it could be published online. This person was the hinge between the physical world of paper records and the digital world of visible information. Without him, the parents in Dubai saw nothing. With him, they saw everything.
I think about this individual often when I encounter complex technology systems that depend, at some invisible point in their operation, on a human being doing something ordinary and essential. The internet of 2001 was full of these people — the data entry operators, the system administrators, the people whose unglamorous daily work made the glamorous promises of the technology real. We celebrated the dial-up connection and the global access. We did not celebrate the boy at the computer, entering attendance figures from a register, making it all possible.
The parents themselves I never witnessed directly. The school controlled the data, the school managed the access, and the parents in Dubai or London or New Jersey who dialled up and connected and waited and then saw their child's records on a screen — I was not in the room for that moment. I built the room. I didn't get to see what happened inside it.
But I have imagined it many times. A parent, far from home, far from their child, navigating an interface that was new to them, waiting for the modem sound to resolve into connection, and then seeing — in whatever form our early system displayed it — that their child had attended school that day, had received this mark, had been present and accounted for in a place they could not physically reach.
That is not a small thing. That is distance made slightly more bearable by technology. That is the gap between two people narrowed, briefly, by a database and a dial-up connection and a boy entering figures from a register.
That is what we built.
Another Brick in the Wall works differently now than it did when Roger Waters wrote it. It was written as a protest — against rigid schooling, against systems that flatten individuality, against institutions that process children rather than educate them. I heard it differently in 2001. I heard it as the sound of someone who refuses to be processed by the institution he is standing inside. Who respects what the institution could be while being completely unbothered by what it is performing itself to be.
That BGS corridor was full of people performing appropriate deference to an important figure. I was not performing deference. I was waiting my turn to offer something real. The song understood this distinction better than I could have articulated it at the time.
We don't need no thought control. What we needed — what I always needed, in every room I have ever walked into with a pitch or a product or an idea — was the freedom to say clearly what the thing was, why it mattered, and what it would do for the person across the table. Not wrapped in institutional courtesy. Not softened by the requirement to seem smaller than I was. Just the thing, plainly stated, offered to someone who had the power to say yes or no.
They mostly said yes.
The internet was early. The infrastructure was unreliable. The parents were far away. The boy was entering records from a register in a school in Bangalore that had decided, before most of its competitors, that the future was a competitive advantage worth buying.
And in a corridor full of people waiting to meet someone important — two young men from Hubli and Bangalore, with a technology the room hadn't seen yet, waiting for their moment — the dial-up sound was still ringing in my head.
It sounded like a connection.
It always did.