The name is Zopher

 The first time I asked the question “Who am I” was when I was in 10th Std. The identity crisis made me insecure. I had to deliberately boost my confidence to convince myself that I was cooler than others. I strongly believe today that no one else would have felt the same about me back then.

I wanted to be a rebel. I was never one. The best I became was a show-off with below average talent. It attracted sufficient attention for me to be satisfied with my life. I felt that the name, “Viswa Narayanan” was too old fashioned and that it was the reason why people didn’t find me cool. So, I wanted a cool name, which would also sound strong to compensate for my physically weak body.

When I watched “Fantastic Four”, the name “Victor Von Doom” grasped my attention. Then I went home and looked at my dictionary to see what the name meant. The word, “Victor” meant “a person who is victorious”. Co-incidentally, my family called me by the name, Vijai, which would translate to Victor in English. I knew that it would be my name for the rest of my life. 

However the second name, “Doom” sounded evilish. Who would dream about becoming a supervillain? I wanted to save the world. I was inspired by Dr. Read Richards. In fact, I wanted to dye my hair white to look like him. So, I sorted out the missions that I wanted to accomplish in life. Then I realized that I hadn’t done anything worthwhile to call myself “Victor”. So, I thought that I could change my second name, whenever I complete a mission, something like “Victor Zero”, when I hadn’t achieved anything; “Victor One”, when I had achieved one goal and so on.

I fell in love with the number Zero. I found it beautiful because it didn’t have any value but still not negative. That felt like a zen-philosophy to me. A person can be a zero without doing anything good in his life and still he can remain a non-bad person. Just because someone is not doing anything good, it wouldn’t make him bad. Even today I am attracted towards this philosophy.

So, I looked for synonyms of ‘zero’ to make my name cooler and I found the name “Zilch”. I started using it frequently to make everyone familiar with the name. Most of them didn’t know that “zilch” meant “nothing”. When I told everyone that I was Zilch, they felt that I had a cool name but they didn’t know that I was trying to say that I was nothing. I still believe that I am nothing significant in this universe.

Whenever I was demotivated, depressed or insecure, I found refuge in calling myself Victor Zilch, the man who hadn’t achieved anything. Even when I achieved one of the goals in the list that I made, I realized that the goal was too insignificant for me to be happy about it. In fact, nothing in the world was worthy enough for me to change my name from Zilch to One (or Ace, the synonym I chose for one). When I joined my college, I got enough exposure to see how truthful my philosophy was.

No matter how much impact we create, we are still insignificant in this universe.

In a way, calling myself as Victor Zilch made me feel honest. After a few years, the world had taught me lessons for being too naive. I was betrayed and thrown into unbearable depression from which I couldn’t recover for a long time. I felt that I was exposing my emotional weakness by being a nice person. I was so pathetic. After whatever people had done to me, I didn’t even want to seek revenge. I just wanted people to have a better life so that they won’t have the need to harass innocent people like me. I prayed to God for that. I was literally becoming a zero. I lost my self-respect and ego at once.

It was ruining my mental health and I could really see my friends trying their best to cheer me up. It was childish how we do crazy things to make ourselves feel better. I wanted to look strong. I wanted those betrayers to not take me for granted. I thought adopting a supervillain name would make me look strong. I had tried every possible way to save me from the never ending cries. Interestingly, a dialog from the Naruto episode, “Zabuza returns” reminded me of what I was telling myself repeatedly during that phase.

“So you’re gonna cry all day in a tragedy? An idiot like you can just cry forever, crybaby.”

I went to extremes and tried ridiculous methods to get strong. I believed that the name Zilch Von Victor sounded like a strong man and that my personality would change when I change my name on Facebook. It did change my personality. I burnt the innocence and childishness that were inside me.

I became Zilch Von Victor (Zilch of Victor), the achiever of nothing, or the man with zero victories. When I moved out of the miserable phase, I also wanted to remove the vile tag. So, I compressed “Zilch of Victor” to Z’Ofor, which I then respelled as “Zopher”, the philosopher.

Thanks for reading. This is my most personal and emotional post. Today I know that exposing my inner feelings and ridiculousness wouldn’t make me weak. I am glad that I could come over everything strong. The name played a vital role in shaping my personality. So, Zopher I am.

Let's say no to convention and build an elasticopter

 “Dude! I’m done with this. Let’s do some real research. Look at these reconfigurable drones. How cool they are!”, he said to me when we were doing a course assignment together. That’s when an imagination transformed into a creation. Or at least that’s when it started.

I was pretty new to research back then. I was juggling between vision, path planning and control. When he proposed this idea to build reconfigurable drones to me, my mind was fixed to it and all I did after that was to get myself equipped with the skills, knowledge and experience that would be required to work on it.

His vision was clear. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He would call me out for a walk and initiate a discussion about how cargo carrying is so inefficient with existing drones. We would start brainstorming about the possible mechanisms that would solve the problem. We would go deeper and try to visualise the challenges that would arise while using our hypothetical mechanisms. Most of the time, we would come up with exaggerated ideas to solve almost all problems with the human race. A lot of laughter and happy moments would follow after every discussion.

We approached our supervisor immediately and proposed the idea. He was skeptical initially because he could see the level of dedication and perseverance required to realise such a project. He didn’t give us an assured go until Suraj demonstrated a toy model to visualize his idea. From that moment on, he had been one of the most supportive people towards this work.

There had been sleepless nights ever since then. Everyday would start with the implementation of a new idea, go on with constant arguments about which approach to proceed, and end with finding a new problem in the implementation. We used to window shop in all online electronics stored and then walk to the nearby gully to buy their inexpensive alternates. Our day wouldn’t end well, if we hadn’t told each other, “Stop scamming”. In fact, some days literally didn’t end. We had been sleep deprived for weeks trying to fix major problems.

It took a while to understand each other’s strengths and distribute the workload between us. When everything was at its peak, Covid also reached its peak. So, we had to take a pause. It wasn’t a comfortable pause to me. Restlessness and anxiety delayed my progress completely. However, he recovered from all his problems quite soon and focussed completely on getting the elasticopter (Roll Credits!!!) up and running.

For months he had to take a double shift and compensate for all the work that was lagging in my absence. I might have never had the courage, motivation, or determination to accomplish such a mammoth task alone. One fine morning, he called me and said, “I am ready to take it to air. Get ready to celebrate our success”. That and a few other doses of motivation helped me to recover from my slack and resume the pending works.

It was weird to access a camera fixed on the lab and his laptop screen from my home, and implement localization and control for the drone. It scared the visitors in my house, who saw a masked man handling mechanical objects in a closed room through the low resolution camera stream. That’s probably my best experience during the pandemic. When we finalised the localization system, the country opened interstate transport, which enabled me to get back to the research center.

We experienced a set of adventures carrying drones from the lab to various places inside the campus to test it. The stares of visitors, who saw our adventures were unforgettable. I knew back then that they wouldn’t be surprised to read about the project in newspapers. And now it is on everyone’s Google feed thanks to the support of IIIT’s incubation center, in which he had registered his startup.

Most exciting part about these news articles is our supervisor’s comment on the project. Back when we took one of his courses, he used to praise one of his former students, who had worked on a revolutionary project more than ten years ago. He said, “Once in a while, we get people like this, who go beyond what others can imagine. I am fortunate to have had him in the lab”. After the class, I told Suraj, “When the elasticopter starts flying, he is gonna tell the same about you”. But back then I never imagined that he would be telling a similar statement to the news media.

It has been a wonderful journey. It often reminds me of my favourite digital art. Please take a look at it. Follow your dreams. They do come true when you put your heart and soul into them.