By Vijay Phanshikar :
 
“For most of my life, I’ve been focused on what’s ahead. Even now, most days I’m working on hoped-for breakthroughs that may not happen for years, if they happen at all. As I grow older, though, I find myself looking back more and more. Piecing 
together memories helps me better 
understand myself, it turns out. It’s a marvel of adulthood to realise that when you strip away all the years and all the learning, much of who you are was there from start. In many ways I’m still that eight-year-old 
sitting at Gami’s dining room table as she deals the cards. I feel the same sense of 
anticipation, a kid alert and wanting to make sense of it all. ...”
- Bill Gates, 
in ‘Source Code -- My beginnings’,
Allen Lane (Penguin Books), 2025, 
Hard Cover 

IN THIS 318-page memoir-like look back on his “beginnings”, the legendary Bill Gates presents a truly wonderfully documented account of his childhood blossoming into an early entrepreneurship that ultimately made a story that needs to be told to every child in the world. For record, it certainly is the story of a precocious little one who dreams shockingly big and earns strength to make those come true. But more truthfully, ‘Source Code’ is the story of a boy who has continued to be that eight-year old having a “sense of anticipation, a kid alert and wanting to make a sense of it all”.

 

It is easy to picture a little child all eager to face the challenges of life and its mysteries -- like the little Bill did sitting at his grandmother’s dining room table waiting for the cards that the game would deal to him. But it is not easy for every child to retain that ‘childness’, if one is allowed to say so, through the vagaries of entrepreneurial life in which business in hard numbers saps out every nuance and grain of innocence a child is bestowed upon by the Divine. In this particular book (of which this piece is not a review), the little child Bill Gates was when he launched his entrepreneurial journey while still in school, peeps out every now and then -- his innocence of not understanding why somebody has cheated him, his energy that refuses to be doused by bad experiences, his ever-willing accommodation of his peers even though they did not behave well, to take a jump into the unknown with his eyes wide open ...! True, he did dream big, and looked to future as a time bringing in success -- though conscious he was that each of those ideas of the future may never materialise. Yet, his mind kept darting back in time, recalling moments passed, rebuilding his own silent understanding of himself -- and looking forward to the road ahead with a child-like and innocent anticipation of what future held for him. Reading Bill Gates about Bill Gates, thus, makes a happy experience. For what emerges from those pages between covers is a marvellous picture of a person who did not allow the boy in him to succumb to life’s hardness.

 

And all the time as he surged ahead -- through the jungle of mistakes and miscalculations and misadventures -- the little Billie (fondly called ‘Trey’ - third - by his family and friends) did never forget his parents’ advice that he had to give back to the society more than he earned.

 

The child in the man, thus, is all the time alive -- eager in anticipation of life’s excitement and uncertainty, ever ready to make corrections as he went along. But throughout the boy-adolescent-youth-man journey, very rarely is Bill Gates found sulking and nursing negativism. For, when’s head and heart are filled with anticipation and the mind engaged in discovering self again and again, there is little room for anything that is not positive. So, even as he kept inventing computer codes at astonishing speed and of astounding value, Bill Gates is also found re-inventing himself again. ‘Source Code’ is that story.