In the mid-1980s, India began a cautious, suspicious courtship with a machine it had long mistrusted. Until then, computers belonged to a distant, air-conditioned world of big cities and men who spoke in a cryptic language of acronyms. In small towns like Wardha, the word “computer” still carried a faint, technophobic chill; it was viewed as a clever toy destined for obsolescence, or worse, a threat designed to replace human labor.

Then, the Indian Railways introduced the computerized reservation system, and the national mood shifted. If you had lived through the old era, you understood that booking a ticket was not a transaction but a bureaucratic ordeal—a test of stamina involving serpentine queues and the thud of a clerk’s stamp that sounded like a judge’s gavel. When the glowing screens arrived, the sweat and the queues remained, but they were joined by a new kind of certainty. The machine did not argue; it simply worked. Slowly, the public stopped seeing computers as threats and began to see them as tools. Bhavana was among the first in our circle to notice this shift, and she viewed it with a seriousness that caught me off guard.

***

The 7 A.M. Logic

In Wardha, technology still meant a sturdy typewriter and the reliability of a carbon copy. If a file vanished, you didn’t query a database; you interrogated human memory. Yet, Bhavana was drawn to this new digital world with a focus that was neither a passing whim nor a hobby. She wanted skills—the kind that would allow her to sit before a screen and make things happen.

The problem was geographical: Wardha offered no place to learn. NIIT in Nagpur was the only reputable name, but it required a staggering eighteen-month commitment and a fee that was significant for a middle-class family. We weren’t wealthy, but we did what families of our station do when they believe in a door worth opening: we adjusted our expectations and dug deep. The only workable schedule for a mother of two small children was a 7 a.m. class in Nagpur. It was a logistical nightmare that turned our home into a place that ran on a timetable set while the rest of the town was in deep sleep.

***

The Geography of the Commute

For a year and a half, the 3 a.m. alarm became the silent conductor of our lives. Bhavana would rise in the stillness of the house—the ceiling fan turning lazily, the children breathing in rhythm—and the kitchen would flicker to life before the first hint of dawn. There was no romance in this routine; it was not heroic, it was simply necessary.

By 3:30 a.m., we would step into the biting air for the seven-kilometre ride to Sevagram station, then known as Wardha (East). The scooter’s headlight cut a narrow tunnel through a deserted landscape where the only other inhabitants were startled stray dogs. I would drop her at the dimly lit platform—a lone figure moving toward a train that promised a different life. At 4:00 a.m., she boarded the Dadar–Nagpur Express, often the only passenger in the compartment, traveling through a landscape that was steady and indifferent.

The part that concerned me most was the arrival at Ajni station before dawn. In those years, the walk through Dhantoli or Ramdaspeth was not a casual stroll for a woman alone. Bhavana dealt with the risk the way a programmer deals with a bug: she planned around it. She waited at the station for an hour, watching the city wake, and only when the light became steady did she walk to her class for two hours of logic, flowcharts, and practice code.

***

The Cost of the Luxury of Being Ordinary

The return trip was a mirror of the morning: the 11 a.m. Maharashtra Express, a shared auto-rickshaw, and a return to Sevagram by 1 p.m. There was no pause for recovery. She slipped immediately back into the roles of mother and homemaker—roles that do not halt simply because one has spent the morning mastering COBOL or C++.

She endured the summer heat that turned train compartments into furnaces and the monsoons that soaked her to the bone. She seldom missed a class. It wasn’t stubbornness for its own sake, but a quiet, steady belief that if she allowed the routine to slip even once, the entire future she was building would collapse. Our neighbors watched this with a mix of admiration and disbelief, as if she were fulfilling a strange personal vow. They recognized that such commitment is expensive; it costs sleep, it costs ease, and it costs the luxury of being ordinary.

Years later, when people ask how we managed to build complex digital systems in a rural hospital like MGIMS, they assume it began with government grants or high-level policy meetings. They are wrong. It began with a woman waking at 3 a.m., making sure her children were tucked in, and riding through the dark toward a railway platform. The first chapter of our technology story was not written in code; it was written in the relentless, unglamorous language of routine.