Circa 2006, my relationship with the internet was just starting out. I vividly remember plugging in a physical telephone wire, clicking a sequence of "Done" buttons, and waiting through a screeching symphony of static and beeps from the dial-up modem to establish a connection. What followed was 15 minutes of carefully planned activities to maximize my time "online." I’d blast out two emails I had meticulously composed ahead of time in Microsoft Word - one to a Google recruiter and one to my single friend abroad. Then, I’d refresh my inbox while staring at a painfully slow loading bar, fervently praying that the friends who promised to be on Yahoo! Messenger were actually there. Twenty minutes max, and then I’d shut it all down. Internet billing was per minute back then, and exceeding a ration of an hour a week would have been financial blasphemy.
Fast forward to 2008. I was two years into my job and enjoyed unlimited internet access at work at a rising tech giant called Google in Hyderabad. But back at my apartment just ten minutes away, I still had zero connectivity. My evening routine became a game of data hoarding before I left for home. I would sit at my desk, watching gray progress bars slowly buffer episodes of my favorite series so I could watch them offline that night. God forbid a video ever crashed on a cliffhanger; I would literally flag down a rattling auto-rickshaw in the humid Hyderabad night, race back to the office, and buffer it all over again.
By 2010, the BlackBerry era had arrived. Every corporate climber at work was handed a device, suddenly convinced they had reached the absolute pinnacle of human evolution. The office corridors were alive with the frenetic, plastic click-clack of tiny keyboards as a handful of folks aggressively hammered away with their thumbs as they walked.
As the years rolled on, my personal life and technology both raced forward at a breathless, almost cinematic pace. On one hand, I transitioned from buffering videos at a desk to holding the entire internet on a smartphone; on the other, I navigated romance, marriage, buying our first home, and welcoming our first baby and capturing every moment on a device in my hand. Notably, I even managed the adventure of losing my laptop, passport, and all other forms of ID during a business trip to the US. I even managed to convince the TSA to let me catch a domestic flight from Seattle to SFO without a single physical ID, simply by showing them pictures of my identity documents I had judiciously saved on my Pixel phone.
Then came the gray hairs, team switches, and a massive cross-continental move. Suddenly, we were walking the very same streets and sharing the same experiences as the characters in Silicon Valley and The Big Bang Theory - shows we used to watch in awe on questionable streaming sites back in India before the true streaming revolution arrived. Before we knew it, we stopped taking large-format mental snapshots and started capturing terabytes worth of our wild adventures on the cloud. Personally, we navigated the road from visas to citizenship, bought a home abroad, flew on a plane piloted by Ajith, ran into actual brown bears in the wild, survived a global pandemic, and welcomed our second child after a whopping nine-year interval.
Snapping to the present, the world is unrecognizable from the one where I started my relationship with the internet and my relationship with Google. Dial-up is history, phones are flawless sheets of glass that we barely even use for talking, and we are actively weaving AI into the fabric of human existence. Yet, only one thing has remained an absolute constant for me: waking up every morning as a Googler.
In a world where change is the only true certainty, Google has been my anchor. So even after two decades, I take none of it for granted: I still pinch myself when the elevator doors open, I hear the familiar hum of the office, and I walk to my desk. It might sound clichéd, but I am incredibly grateful for these 20 years of luck, grit, and grace that got me here and kept me here. As the world continues to spin faster than ever, I’m hoping to hold onto the most valuable thing I had back in 2006: a beginner's mindset.
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PS: Vint Cerf, recognized as one of the fathers of the internet and famous Google employee recently celebrated his 20th Google anniversary at 83. Sharing one of my favorite pictures from Google - the selfie I took with him as we collaborated on a project back in 2017 
