Breaking the Manacles...

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

This proverb has always caught my attention and will always be close to me. I believe necessity is what kept pushing the human kind to be where it is. The necessity to communicate brought about the invention of the telephone and the necessity to have an artificial sun lead to the invention of the electric bulb. Many instances of necessity have brought out the best of many people and lead to much pathbreaking discoveries and inventions. I could relate to this well because there was one such instance where necessity invoked a new passion in me which I cherish till date.

This was when I got a new Android smartphone during the time it was newly launched. I was intrigued by the features it has to offer and the limitless apps in the play store which opened doors to unlimited possibilities. The only restraint I had at that time was I couldn't download the apps because I didn't have a wifi router at my home, just a broadband connection to my computer. Mobile data was not a thing at that time, the speeds were really slow, I wasn't subscribed to any mobile data plan and it wasn't cheap! I was really really agitated that there was a world of possibilities waiting for me outside but I was stuck in a closed room with no key to get me out.

So I started searching the web if I could somehow use the internet in my computer on my mobile through the USB cable, which was the only bridge I could think of between the devices. Surfing the web for a long period of time I got to know that there is a feature called USB tethering which helps us use the mobile data in the phone on the computer via USB cable, this is exactly the opposite of what I wanted but there was no such feature which could do the opposite. This annoyed me further as to who in their right mind would use their mobile data on their computer (We didn't have Jio at that time, so I take it back now). Surfing for even longer I struck gold! I found a website XDA Developers which illustrated the process of achieving what I wanted but through a process called 'Rooting'.

This was the first time I came across this mobile jargon and I started digging deep into it. It's basically getting admin privileges of your mobile smartphone so you can tweak it any way you want to. I haphazardly rooted my phone disregarding all the warnings on the website that it was still in a beta phase and doing so would 'Brick' my device and also void my warranty. I was on cloud nine when I successfully rooted my phone and I downloaded as many apps and games I could from the play store.

Alas! my happiness lasted only a single day. The next morning when I tried to switch on my phone it didn't come to life. I started panicking and tried all sorts to power it on but it was as good as a brick...wait! didn't I read about this before? I quickly opened up XDA developers page and read about how an unstable modification of the device firmware could brick the device and bringing it back to life is a really cumbersome task.

My necessity, well it was more of a desperation, to bring the device back to life made me dig deep into the Android software tools and after struggling for two long days I could finally bring the device back to life! This might not seem to be a great thing but it gave me a sense of self-content of what I achieved.

This was a stepping stone of my journey toward knowing more about the mobile platform tools. What started as a necessity morphed into a quest for knowledge about the methods and tools which are being used by the developers. Since then I've started honing my abilities to use these tools and I can say that I'm well versed with most of the technical jargon. I wouldn't call myself a developer but I've tested many Custom Firmware and developer tools and I'm quite happy with what I do.

Sometimes we get bogged down by the surrounding demarcations and sometimes self-imposed ones. One should never be daunted to charter the unchartered path for the things we are passionate about.

In the learning process you mess things up and you feel that you are at a point of no return but the necessity and passion towards your work makes you resilient and bounce back. There is a famous quote, one of many, by Thomas Alva Edison about the light bulb, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work". The only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing.