A (very) brief history of Raffay

An attempted humorous essay, mostly about my academic/professional life, I wrote soon after joining Georgia Tech.

Almost twenty four years ago, in the city of Lahore, was born an angelic boy whose parents lovingly named him Raffay (that would be me). If you asked me to summarize my early childhood, I would cite the historic quote from my mom:

"Raffay! when are you going to start your homework!" - My Mom.

As a kid, I was never one of the studious type. In fact, books repelled me as if we both had similar electric charge. It beats me how at the age of eight, did I ask my parents (or so they tell me), the reason why things come down when thrown up. Though it did make them ecstatic to know their son had asked the same earth shattering question that had led Newton to present his Law of Gravity (an urban legend), it didn’t have much of an impact on my grades. The fact that I was nicknamed Newton after that, seem all the more ironic. However, for some reason I always did enjoy our science class. I am not quite sure whether it really was some inner voice that compelled me to fathom the mysteries of nature, or the fact that I had had an adolescent crush over our science teacher.

I don’t know who to blame more, the tenacity of my parents, the strictness of my teachers, or perhaps the both, that kept me from quitting school and taking cricket as a full time profession. Their unfaltering insistence to persuade me to study took its toll, and I gradually started to develop an interest in my studies. With the passage of time, my grades started to improve, which in turn encouraged me further, and hence a chain reaction was started.

Though I had been showing consistent improvement in my academic performance, the most significant break came with my matriculation result. I scored above 90 percent, and was ranked amongst the top three students in my school. Since nobody in our family had expected such feat of outstanding achievement, we didn’t quite know what to do about it. Where I come from, parents don’t usually ask their kids about their particular interests or mental aptitudes. If you score above 80%, it goes without saying that you would join a pre-medical or a pre-engineering college - and my case was no different. As I was exceptionally poor in Biology, and evidently not so in Mathematics, it was decided without any debate that I would take pre-engineering courses for my Intermediate. Luckily, I was offered admission from The Government College Lahore.

For my aptitude towards Mathematics and Solid State Physics during intermediate, Electrical Engineering was my obvious choice for undergraduate school. The fortuitous fact that I had ranked amongst the top few students in more than a hundred thousand in the intermediate exams, encouraged the admission committee to think it was not just imperative for the progression of science world, but essential for the betterment of whole mankind to enrich the boundless talents of this young genius by giving him admission to their alma-mater. Ergo - I was admitted to the University of Engineering and Technology (U.E.T), Lahore.

I took some time adjusting to the UET environment, but once I did, UET became an integral part of my personality, helping me learn so much. Besides the invaluable lesson that it is probably not a good idea to fall for your dean's daughter, it taught me when not to study (all year, except the last two months), how to ride a motorbike on one wheel, and how to blow smoke rings. But on a serious note, it taught me how to interact with people with different backgrounds, do research, and be helpful to  ones juniors. A lot of who I am today is because of my time spent at UET.

Immediately after graduation, I joined Techlogix Inc., one of the leading technological companies of Pakistan. Being a part of Techlogix family was a wonderful experience, both in terms of professional as well as personal growth. I learned the cutting-edge technologies in the field of vision science, increased my market value by being associated with a good company, and basically had a blast in its extremely friendly working environment.

While working at Techlogix, I starting to suspect there might be a researcher buried somewhere deep inside of me, and as the saying goes - curiosity killed the cat, I, curious by nature, decided to dig deeper. As a litmus test, I applied to graduate schools in the U.S. and fortunately got accepted at Georgia Tech.

The details of how I actually managed to come to the US is a story for some other time. As for living in the US - so far, so good. While juggling between settling down, cooking, cleaning, washing and doing laundry, not to mention the tons of assignments and research work which I once in a while try to get my hands on, I end up with hardly enough time to do anything else - but I am loving it !

The rest, I believe is future. I am sure you would be wondering, "will this extremely charming and promising young man be able to break new grounds in the field of Computer Vision, present the Grand Unified Theory of Physics, and finally establish world peace?", "will he be able to find the love of his life, get married to her and live happily ever after"?

Well, to find out - stay tuned ;-)

October 2002.