Blog 3 of 30
It was June 26, 1992. I received a box of visiting cards with my name and the logo of Masterpage. Mr. Joe D’Silva had remembered our conversation and taken the initiative to design my cards. I still remember it was the wedding anniversary of my in-laws and we were driving out to dinner. I was talking to my husband, about this and wondered if I should really start my own agency. He sounded interested and encouraged me to try. After dinner at the Chinese restaurant, we were given a bowl of fortune cookies. Mine read – “The endeavour you have in mind will be successful.”
I know now and I knew then that it is silly to believe in a cookie, but somehow that fortune cookie helped me make up my mind. And on that day, at least in my mind Masterpage was born. It wasn’t till later that I got projects and clients, but I always think of June 26, as the birth of Masterpage. I carried that fortune in my purse for years till it literally crumbled to dust.
It seems foolhardy today deciding to do something like that on a whim. Where was the market research, the projected budgets, or potential clients? I had nothing except a dream, a great deal of faith in my abilities and a box of visiting cards!
I was young when I started Masterpage. I was all of 25. In the early nineties long before the start up culture, 25-year-olds studied or interned or worked. They did not start companies and agencies. Today looking back, I realise that none of those dreams came true, but many others did and this story is about the things that did come true.
As a 25-year-old I had a dream of writing for people, of being in demand as a writer, having people reach out to me and want me to write for them. I dreamed of people reading my writing and changing their lives with it, of writing words that would move people and change the world. We all dream of changing the world in our 20s. I would like to think that 30 years later that maybe I did impact people in a few ways – but never in ways I dreamed I would do.
At that moment though, it was exciting to have a visiting card and thanks to a computer we had brought back from the US – a 386 intel chip machine with a 40MB hard drive loaded with legal software including Adobe Pagemaker and Wordstar for my documentation purposes – I felt very privileged and set aside a room in the house to work.
A dear old friend from school called to say that her father-in-law was disposing a large desk. It was huge, almost six feet wide, but my friends knew me well and knew that I loved to spread out when I worked. After manoeuvring it very painstakingly up the stairs of my home and into the small room, I now had what I proudly called an office. What I did not have was clients. What I did have was two young children, one barely six months old and the other three years old. Somehow, I had to figure out how to take care of my children and find work.
Ripples Of Life and Time 