Vijay Rajakumar

>Every indian kid growing up in one of those sleepy towns in the 90s would have followed with heart one or more of these – cricket, wwf, cartoon, computer games. This was at least what the kids in my town – Vellore did. I grew up with just one thing – Cartoon network. A big chunk of my childhood memories, profound ‘learnings’, etc were through the Cartoon Network.

Recently, my dad emailed me a drawing I drew for my preschools’ annual magazine back in 1993. Its GI Joe in one of their dramatic sea wars with the bad guys – the cobras. I should have had a blast drawing all those nifty details. Well, the school never printed it. It was just too violent :-)

It did not take long for my parents to realize, that “controlling” me was easy. More cartoon network time and I was a non-issue. I am not trying to be all dramatic about cartoons here. But seriously they seems to have been a good “big brother” for me.  Here’s the list of my favorite cartoons as a kid and how they shaped my life!!! (I am not drunk).

1. Swat kats:
It played on weekdays at 4.30 pm from 95-97. My school ended at 4.00pm and I never stayed back at school to hang out or anything because Swat katz episodes were never replayed. For me, Swat kats was more than just another cartoon. Two unassuming kids from a junkyard garage build a jet plane and ass kick all the bad guys in town. I imagined myself to be one of those swat kat and my friend G.V from next street was the other swat kat. Guess what we tried to build for Intel young scientist in 1996 (I was age 9 at that time) – a small jet  engine. I am not kidding, we spent a whole summer trying to build one. G.V’s parents had just bought a big fridge for home, and it had came in a huge ass card board box. The card board box became our garage lab. We took the design from howstuffworks.com and it showed that we needed – an aluminium cylinder, jet fuel and fire. At least that’s what the drawing shows even now. Fire was easy. The aluminium cylinder was the pond’s powder tin. G.V researched and found out that jet fuel is used to clean watches. We made friends with a  local watch repair guy and got that from him. Our first rocket literally blew up in G.V’s terrace but we were safe in our card board bunker. We never submitted our findings to Intel.

The point is I have always loved to have that one buddy to try those “moon shot” like crazy projects. In college, my buddy Vijay Daniel was one. We did some crazy programming stuff, as well as lots of boozing and general ass kicking. In our senior year, we decided to study neuroscience to conquer the next human frontier – the mind. Well, it kind of bombed but we had a blast doing it anyway. We published our findings this time around. Now, after UCI,  I am working with my professor-advisor-boss-cycling buddy Chen to build a small startup – bimaple.com. This time it is a more sane and calculated project and it might well be the swat kats project for me :-)

2. Dexter’s lab:
Dexter is a super secretive cool kid packing a super cool lab in his room, in short he is a nerd. He learns and does cool projects and shows off to his very close friends. Also, he has a nagging big sister. Dexter was like a role model for me. I really like to learn cool stuff to show off to my very close folks. I still do. I got into the habit of programming and reading books because of this.

3. Captain planet,  Johnny Quest and Centurions:
All these three cartoons have a somewhat similar theme. A small group of counter-culture folks do the right thing and change the world for good. These cartoons taught me two things – Mother Earth needs to be protected (Captain Planet) and computers are going get very interesting in the future(Johnny Quest, Centurions).
I am yet to do something concrete about saving mother earth and stuff. All I have for now is this tattoo I got last year.

4. Johnny Bravo:
I hated  johnny bravo and knew that he was a douche, but I watched it anyway. Because I secretly did wish that I would grow up to be like Johnny Bravo. Even now, I daydream of making a million dollars and just fly away to Tahiti to open a surf shack by the beach and just chill for life.