Gautam Godse

PICT Podcast interview

On my last trip to India earlier this year, I got a chance to be on the PICT podcast. I was visiting my alma mater, PICT, and the students were kind enough to ask me to be featured on their new podcast series. I had a great time discussing back and forth with the host,…
Let’s build a hang glider

I’ve always had a thing for flight. It started in high school, with the unmistakable smell of balsa wood glue and nitro fuel. My weekends were spent building model airplanes under the quiet but watchful eye of Captain Bhole, the stern yet patient head of the NCC Air Wing in Pune. He ran a tight…
Do you want to do an ad for Apple?

It was the summer of 2002. I had just joined the San Gabriel Valley Mac User Club (SGVMUG) in Pasadena because in late 2001 I had switched to a Mac. For all my friends who know me well, this was a major shift, since until 2000 I was a firm believer and evangelist of Linux.…
Bring your father.

The BBS started to get popular in the nerdy crowd in Pune. Since I had recently graduated from PICT, my friends and colleagues there started using it, and then word of mouth spread rapidly through Pune.Remember, this was in 1994 and BEFORE the internet. That was still about three years in the future. People were…
Starting a startup…

Dejected after my F-1 student visa got the ax at the US Consulate, I knew I had to shake things up. Fresh out of college in ’92, I persuaded Mr. Ramakrishna, or RK as we fondly called him, to start an R&D lab at PICT. Under the aegis of the Society for Computer Technology &…
The Butterfly Effect Deux

Year one of computer engineering at PICT didn’t quite sparkle as I’d hoped. I dreamed of diving headfirst into new programming languages, crafting software applications daily. Sure, the classes on computer hardware and microprocessors were intriguing, but the rest? Entirely superfluous in my book. Thermodynamics? Engineering Drawing on actual paper? Mechanical workshop projects? What the…
The Butterfly Effect

My career in computing was triggered by two small butterfly events seven years apart. Looking back after 40 years, it seemed preordained, but I almost became a doctor instead of a computer engineer. The first one was in the summer of 1984. I had just finished my 10th standard exams and was looking forward to…
You are a potential immigrant

With those words, the young, fresh-faced consulate officer at the US Consulate in Bombay dashed my hopes of traveling to America for my Master’s degree. This was the third time that I was being denied an F-1 student visa, that coveted document that would allow me to study at Cal State Chico in California. It…