The sun was already leaning west when Dilli returned home from the bank, his tiny footsteps echoing with the weight of a day too large for a ten-year-old. He tossed his schoolbag aside, his eyes flashing toward the computer desk—the portal where his destiny was being rewritten.
The Bet365 wallet glowed on the screen: ₹7,20,000/-.
Two matches waited like doors to fortune.
Match 1: Zimbabwe vs. Sri Lanka. Odds: 1.7 in favor of Sri Lanka.
Without hesitation, Dilli dropped the entire sum. Every rupee. 7,20,000/-.
His heart thudded like a war drum as the match unfolded. But when Sri Lanka scraped through, winning by four wickets, his wallet numbers exploded: ₹12,24,000/-.
He grinned, not the grin of a boy, but of a predator who had tasted blood.
No pause. No fear.
Match 2: Kenya vs. Pakistan. Odds: 1.5. Pakistan the favorite.
Dilli hurled his winnings like a spear—₹12,24,000/- straight on Pakistan.
By the evening, Pakistan crushed Kenya by seven wickets, and the wallet swelled monstrously to ₹18,36,000/-.
Dilli leaned back in his chair, almost laughing at the screen. He immediately withdrew ₹1,36,000/- to the bank, leaving a massive ₹17,00,000/- in Bet365.
But then, something shifted. The thrill of numbers on a screen wasn't enough. The boy who once avoided textbooks now looked at the glowing keyboard with a different hunger.
His fingers hovered, then began typing. Not games. Not music. Not pirated movies. But code.
Lines of programming text filled the monitor. It looked alien, but not to him. His elder self, with its countless failures in breaking into the IT industry from the defense sector, whispered like a ghost in his ears. Those painful attempts at Java automation, the endless YouTube tutorials on Python, SQL, Power BI, Machine Learning, NLP, and AI model development—every frustration, every dead end, every "almost made it" was now a map of shortcuts in his brain.
He remembered brushing against LLMOps, cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and the fast-changing world of Generative AI. His old self had failed to master them. But now, with sharpened memory, with a second chance at life, with cheat codes of knowledge, Dilli swore he would master them all. Not dabble. Not skim. Master.
Behind him, his father and mother stood silently in the doorway. Their son, the one who only used the family computer for games, songs, and movies, was typing with frightening seriousness. The clicking of keys filled the room like a chant of transformation.
His father whispered, "He's… actually doing something useful."
His mother's eyes softened, a prayer forming in her heart.
But Dilli didn't hear them. His world had narrowed into the glow of the monitor, into the endless possibilities of code and computation. A roadmap was opening—stocks, knowledge, technology—all flowing together toward a single destiny.
The boy who turned gambling odds into millions was now arming himself with the weapons of the future.
For the first time , Dilli felt the tremor of something greater than luck—power born of knowledge.