Teenage techie on a roll
Nabeel A. Khan

THE twists and turns of dingy lanes in Old Delhi’s Kasab Pura take you to a one-room rented accommodation where one of the country’s youngest cyber wizards and "ethical hacker" Sahil Khan lives. He is now getting ready for the release of his fourth book.

Sixteen-year-old Sahil has achieved a lot. He has invented nine computer games and written three books on computer sciences, making him one of the youngest people in the country to have published on the subject.

"My fourth book Tricks of Email Hacking is ready for release this month," Sahil told IANS.

Sahil, who calls himself an "ethical hacker", lives here with his younger brother and mother.

His mother gives tuitions to schoolchildren to carve out a modest living, while his father is a hakeem (practitioner of Unani medicine) in Mumbai. The family hails from a small village, Bugrasi, in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh.

Sahil, nicknamed ‘Indian Einstein’ by a section of the electronic media, invented nine computer games when he was 13 and wrote his first book on computer hacking a year later.

"When I made my first game at home I told mother, but she was not excited, thinking it would just be a petty thing. Later she realised when my teacher told her. Soon the school formally announced it and I got an award from Newspapers in Education (NIE),"Sahil said.

Sahil, a humble and soft-spoken teenager, did not attend any professional course in computer science and he also did not own a personal computer until recently. His first interaction with computers began when he learnt Internet chatting with his father who stays in Mumbai.

"Since then he got interested in gaming on computers and though we did not have enough money to buy a computer, soon somehow I managed to buy him a PC on instalments," said Sahil’s mother Atiya Suleman.

Sahil, a student of Class 10 at Harcourt Butler Sr. Secondary School, however, doesn’t bask in his achievements and feels that every person has some special quality, which needs to be pursued at the right time.

What are his plans for the future?

"For now my main focus is on board examinations and then I will try to get into an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and become a cyber expert of repute," Sahil said.

Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal launched Sahil’s first book Hackers and Crackers, which was published by ABC. — IANS

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