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My son Amar had been nagging me to look at his emails (most of the time he sent me video clips) and comment on the content.
To tell you honestly, I had taken a look at a couple of his emails which in turn were sent to him by an ex-colleague. They were amateur videos – things I thought were a dime a dozen.
I routinely began ignoring them because I had more serious things to do.
Among other things in my house, there are two computers. My son can use mine, but I can't touch his. He is so secretive about the whole thing that he has got a new telephone line with a modem to hook his computer to the internet.
Amar is so possessive about his machine that he doesn't allow my daughter Amrita (who got married in April this year) to touch his computer when she comes home 'to have a bite before going home' and checks her emails.
My son and daughter have always been fighting like Kilkenny cats – but that is not the reason for this edition of my column (which isn't being read anyway, says my son).
Two days ago, Amar had a glint in his eye when he spoke to me.
"You really don't know what you are missing. In just two days, you will stay awake till 4 a.m. and go through all my emails feverishly. But, by then, it will be too late. Before that, the whole world will know," he said cryptically.
I was faintly interested. I tried to get the punch line out of him, but he simply didn't play ball.
"Go through my emails. See if you can make a connection," he said enigmatically.
I prodded him by saying that this was simply too much. We live under the same roof, yet have two computers and he sends me email and expects me to read his stuff.
Yesterday, his computer conked out because someone had sent him a hitherto unknown virus.
I was vicariously happy for sometime at my son's predicament.
My son seemed totally listless without his computer. As always, I offered my machine which has the latest in firewalls.
Amar is much more computer savvy than myself and somehow managed to repair his machine all by himself within a span of three hours with God only knows what software.
Yesterday morning, (October 10) I got up late, despite being my birthday and all that.
After the customary visit to the temple, my wife's sumptuous lunch with sweets, I again noticed the glint in his eye.
"End this suspense, Amar," I told him when all of us including my son-in-law and nephew were dining at one of the Saravanas outlets to celebrate the fact that I had completed 51 years on this earth.
"Heard of Chad Hurley?"
"No."
"Steven Chen?"
"No."
"YouTube?"
"No."
"These three names together, with effect from yesterday morning are worth roughly US$1.65 billion, if Google shares continue to retain their value for some more time. Hurley and Chen dreamt up a scheme a year ago to create a website called YouTube which would show proprietary video clips shot by virtually anybody. A venture capital company got interested and pumped some money into it. After a year despite the website losing money, Hurley and Chen sold the whole thing to Google.com for US$ 1.65," Amar announced.
"So what is the punch line," I asked him.
"Remember all those video clips I sent you? All of them were from YouTube. With your scheming greying brain, if you had followed my lead, you would have known that this was big time stuff. Now you know."
I suddenly forgot that it was my birthday dinner and lost interest in the food. After listlessly listening to my little family, I returned home to my computer. Since I subscribe to New York Times, the news was in my inbox.
Come to think of it, YouTube was a simple business plan. These days almost everybody has a video camera thanks to the mobile revolution. But then, what are the use of those pictures if nobody sees them? So, Chen and Hurley hit upon a plan of creating a space for amateur pictures on the net and called it YouTube. It caught everybody's fancy though it didn't make any money. But, it became such a hot thing that Yahoo, Viacom and News Corp virtually fell over each other to buy it.
Hurley and Chen are twenty three years younger than me.
Is YouTube really worth that much?
Frankly, I don't know.
Google's vice president David Drummond has an enigmatic explanation to the whole thing.
"We modeled this on a more or less synergistic kind of model. You can imagine this would be hard to do on a stand-alone basis," Drummond was quoted as saying.
Microsoft's Chief Executive Steven Ballmer is still not sold on the idea.
"If you think this is the future of television, it is worth that price. If you think differently, it isn't worth that much at all," Ballmer said.
I still don't know how many zeroes do US$1.65 billions have. I don't even want to calculate how much it would be in Indian Rupees (INR, my son keeps saying).
I only know that India's foreign exchange reserves are a little less than US$200 billion.
Google.com alone is worth nearly US$132 billion.
And I have been reading all the emails sent by my son since yesterday around 10-30 pm.
It is three past three in the morning now.
I know I won't be going to sleep for some more time because there is more to read. In between that, I decided to tell those who spend time reading my stuff how the computer savvy youth of today knew what an old media hack like me couldn't find out despite its sitting in my box all the while.
So the next time, somebody young gives you a smart idea or a good lead, please listen.
Maybe, you would end up making a billion.
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