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November 9, 2007 @ 10:18 am·Filed under
News
Against all odds, this former software engineer became one of India’s most successful authors
By Madhavankutty Pillai, Reader's Digest, November 2007.
Download the Reader’s Digest Story  (1.40MB)
IT'S NEARING midnight and Alexis Leon is in his book-lined study. With a Mozart symphony playing softly, Leon has been writing away on his PC since 9:30pm. He took a short break at 11—to think.
At times the pain in his shoulders, caused by his injured spine, is unbearable. But, tonight, the words are flowing. Indeed, for Leon, it’s these words and ideas that help numb the pain. “Works better than analgesics,” he laughs. “Painkillers only make me groggy. And I’d wake up in even worse pain.”
Leon is writing three books simultaneously: the second edition of his Fundamentals of Information Technology (FIT). Its first edition sold over 75,000 copies. The next one is a book… on writing books. The third is a guide to creating better manuals for computer programs. As he works on FIT, a sudden brainwave strikes. He switches windows, makes notes for the second book, and returns to his FIT chapter. Later, Leon takes another break, to solve puzzles from Brain Stretchers before resuming his writing. By 1am, he’ll catch some sleep and begin writing after breakfast.
IF YOU HAVEN'T heard of Alexis Leon, you’re probably not into software. His 40 published books have taught and explained computing—from the very basics of programming and the Internet to some of the most mind-boggling areas of software engineering.
Had Leon, 41, not become a writer, he’d still have been a brilliant software professional. Even as an industrial engineering student in Trivandrum, Alexis was disciplined about revising his daily lessons. So, while his classmates were cramming frantically before exams, Alexis read novels or rode his trusty motorbike, but passed his BTech with a university first rank.
His MTech project was on artificial intelligence (AI), about making computers behave like humans. On his first job at a Pondicherry firm where Leon handled, of all things, the manufacture and export of shoes, he helped develop a computerized system using AI to boost output. A similar program from the UK would have cost £50,000 but with Leon’s system in hand, his employers didn’t have to buy it.
When Leon moved to Chennai to join Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s biggest software company, he was plunged straight into a complicated project. With his training classes to attend, Leon requested that his boss take him off the project as it all seemed too overwhelming. “No,” he was told. “Life is tough...”
The project completed, Leon gave a demonstration. It went smoothly—for the first few minutes. Then, to his chagrin, it failed. He’d ignored an important step. “Too eager to show it off,” he recalls, “I hadn’t tested it properly. That was also a crucial lesson for life.”
Leon realized the importance of pondering deeply, taking notes like a student, and testing every line of program he wrote. At TCS, his knowledge of industrial engineering combined with his software skills made him unique.
In 1993, he became engaged to a girl in Kerala, whom he’d phone every other day. After the wedding, they were going to Switzerland, where Leon had a brief assignment.
On December 2nd that year, weeks before his wedding day, Leon’s fiancée and her mother came to Chennai for some wedding shopping. Life seemed full of promise for the 27-year-old as he rode off on a scooter to meet his fiancée for lunch. Minutes later, a speeding autorickshaw jumped a red light. Leon accelerated to avoid it, but the rickshaw smashed into the scooter, flinging him to the ground. He blacked out.
When he returned to consciousness, his head felt as if it would explode. Two policemen tried to lay him down on the seat of another autorickshaw. But Leon was too big to fit. So they crammed him into the vehicle’s floor. It was the worst thing they could have done. It aggravated his injury, damaging his spinal cord.
One person who saw him in hospital soon after the accident was his TCS colleague Rajesh Nambiar. “He’d been so active and fun loving,” Nambiar recalls. “So when I saw him lying on his stomach, scarred, devastated and unable to move anything but his hands, I couldn’t help thinking that death may have been kinder for Alexis.”
“DON’T SMILE,” the doctor told Leon, her grim expression framed against the bare white walls of the Christian Medical College (CMC) hospital in Vellore. “I know how much effort it takes to hold that smile.”
Leon, actually, was too shell shocked to realize what he was doing. The full extent of his disabilities had just been revealed to him. He’d forever be paralyzed chest-down.
His parents and his brother Mathews were at Leon’s bedside. If I crumble now, Leon thought, they’ll crumble too.
Leon spent ten weeks at CMC. Therapists taught him to use his arms to shift himself between bed and wheelchair, to sit, use the toilet, write with a pen again. Meanwhile, the marriage was called off. Most of the time, he managed to mask his despair and his terror of the future. But once, when he interrupted a minor argument between his father and brother, wondering if he were the cause, Mathews said brusquely, “Stay out of this!” Something snapped. Leon cried non-stop for 20 minutes. “All my pent up grief,” he says, “finally got released.”
SOON AFTER he left CMC, he tried to migrate to the disabled-friendly West where he felt he could live more independently. But friends who’d already settled there were discouraging.
“We find it difficult to cope here,” replied one who’d just moved to the US. “How will you?” Leon, clearly, had to make the best of it in India itself.
TCS welcomed Leon back, providing him a ground-floor cubicle, a ramp for his wheelchair and a toilet adapted for his use. He drove to work in a customized, hand-operated Maruti 800, Mathews riding alongside on a motorbike. At the office, Mathews would transfer his brother to a wheelchair, take him to his cubicle, and return in the evening for the journey home. “To everybody’s relief, Alexis resurfaced as the fine software engineer he was,” recalls Gibu Thomas, Leon’s best friend and former TCS colleague, who spent much time with him and played a key role in his recovery.
ALTHOUGH HE appeared cheerful at work, Leon was plagued by questions: Why me? Why now? Constantly irritable, he rarely got a full night’s sleep.
Then one day, Leon read a Reader’s Digest article that his father sent him, entitled “Lessons My Children Taught Me.” An underlined passage immediately caught his eye: “When God closes all doors, He opens a window. Often we spend so much energy banging on closed doors that we forget to feel and enjoy the breeze coming through the open window.”
It struck a chord in Leon. “Instead of worrying about my losses,” recalls Leon, “I started to count all the things I still had, and it was a revelation.” I have an education; I have work, the respect of my colleagues. I have a family that supports me. So many windows are open!
In 1995, Alexis Leon saw another window opening even before he quit TCS to become a partner in a new software firm. Having always been a compulsive reader and note taker, jotting down interesting points from whatever he read, his notebooks by now contained information on subjects ranging from computer science and history to open heart surgery. Most detailed of all were his notes on programming large “mainframe” computers.
Why not put these notes to good use? Only expensive foreign books on mainframe programming were available in the country. IBM did have manuals, but their prose was unintelligible to most beginner programmers.
Leon wrote to five publishers, proposing books on mainframe topics. He soon got a call from Vikas Gupta, head of Pustak Mahal, a Delhi publisher. “I’m in Chennai,” Gupta said. “Can we meet at my hotel?”
“Could you please come home?” Leon replied. “I am a paraplegic.”
When Leon suggested a book Customer Information Control Systems (CICS), Gupta agreed, and offered a Rs3000 advance.
“I’d thought he’d offer 50,000,” Leon recalls with a chuckle. “But, really, I’d have done it for free. It’s hard to get your first book published.”
Working day and night, Alexis finished it in two months. The 280-page book was priced at just Rs199, and included a floppy disk with a quiz comprising interview questions that foreign employers ask Indian software engineers. It sold thousands of copies.
Over the next few years, more windows opened and Leon enjoyed the breeze. IBM Mainframe and Year 2000 Solutions, on the millennium, or Y2K, problem, was an instant bestseller and became the standard textbook in mainframe training institutes.
WITH A CHRISTIAN NAME like Alexis Leon, many readers automatically assume that he is European. Once his cousin Davis Joseph picked up one of Leon’s books, Internet for Everyone, at a Kochi railway bookstall. “Take it, he’s a great Russian author,” recommended the shopkeeper. Davis had a laugh as he paid for his cousin’s book.
Actually Leon never wrote the contents of Internet for Everyone with a book in mind. But P.K. Madhavan, a senior editor and publisher, had seen Leon’s Y2K bestseller and sought him out in Chennai. Madhavan casually eyed some printouts lying on Leon’s desk and was amazed. Leon explained that he’d written it for the benefit of a young relative.
“I’d edited over 600 books,” Madhavan says. “But this manuscript needed no editing and could be made into a book right away.” Internet for Everyone (1997) has sold over 100,000 copies in several countries and still sells about 2500 copies a year. In its chapter on email basics, Alexis explained how to create an email ID—still a novelty in 1997—and asked readers to send him their first email. He soon received a barrage of emails, most of them with technical queries. A few also asked for money to buy computers. “I always answered the technical stuff,” says Leon, “but when they asked for money, I sent them Bill Gates’s email address.”
Tata McGraw-Hill, India’s biggest publisher of educational and professional books, has published 15 of Leon’s books; two of them have been translated into Mandarin-Chinese. And Artech House, USA, published his A Guide to Software Configuration Management. SCM is such an esoteric subject, there existed just 11 books on it in the world when Leon wrote his in 2000. It remained an Artech bestseller for three years.
IN EARLY 2000, Leon moved to Kakkanad, outside of Kochi, Kerala, where he resides with Mathews and his family. The bond between the brothers is deep. Mathews is not only his companion and caretaker, but also his critic, graphics artist, research assistant and, at times, co-author. Most of Leon’s other contacts are in cyberspace. The Internet—and Leon’s six websites including his alexisleon.com and leon-leon.com (companion site for his books)—has not only brought him connections, but much of the material for some of his books.
As the Internet took him everywhere—mentally—he stopped driving his car or going to the beach on Sundays. His physical world shrank into two rooms, his study and the bedroom. All he did now was write, think and read. “What’s the point in going out? There’s hardly any place that’s wheelchair accessible in India,” he says. “But with the Internet, I’m connected and I now have more friends in cyberspace than in the physical world.”
Many friends were made through his blog, “Reflections of a Survivor” (alexisleon.com /ros/). One recent post, a comic and surrealistic piece about a college crush and his first kiss, has over 30 reader comments. And you’ll find reflections, like the one on his accident scars: “There was a scar on my forehead too,” he writes, “the one I loved to have. But it is not at all visible now; may be I didn’t hit my head hard enough.”
LEON SELDOM TALKS about what is hard for him. He focuses on his joys and his achievements, although there are things he misses (like walking in his family’s paddy fields or watching birds and rabbits there, according to one blog).
“I’d indeed have preferred to be an author without a wheelchair,” he says. But there’s a paradox. “If I hadn’t met with that road accident, I may never have written a book.”
You could email Alexis Leon: alexis@alexisleon.com
Copyright © 2007 Reader's Digest. Reproduced with permission.
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