I was slow at learning things most kids picked up easily. Reading out loud was the worst. I still remember standing in class, trying to drag words out of a page while everyone waited. “Umm… maa… err…” The silence felt loud. My chest would tighten. I could feel myself falling behind in real time.
For years I didn’t have a name for that feeling. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started understanding things like ADHD, attention patterns, and different ways brains learn. As a child, it just felt like a quiet, private failure — the sense that everyone else had received a manual I somehow missed.
The person who refused to believe that story was my grandmother.
She had no formal education. None. She taught herself to read using her children’s schoolbooks. Then she kept going. She read anything she could find — Bangla novels, old English books, bits of Arabic. Not because anyone asked her to. Just because she could.
And she didn’t stop at herself.
She taught the house helps. Neighbours. Anyone who lingered long enough in the room. She would sit with a book and a pencil and start from the alphabet. Patient. Certain. As if literacy was not a privilege, but a responsibility.
When I struggled with reading, she took it personally. Not with pressure — with stubborn love. She would sit beside me and move at my pace. No embarrassment. No comparison. Just this quiet belief that I would get there.
I didn’t realise how rare that kind of belief was until much later. And I definitely didn’t understand how much it shaped me until after she was gone.
For a long time after that, I became a collector of skills. Robotics. 3D modelling. Programming. Game development. Film. I was curious about everything and committed to nothing. From the outside it looked like range. From the inside it often felt like searching — like I was circling something I couldn’t yet name.
The turning point wasn’t some grand achievement. It was something small.
I volunteered at the American Center Dhaka’s MakerSpace, teaching kids programming and 3D modelling. I liked it, but I still treated it as just another experiment.
Then one day, a former student reached out and told me those workshops had introduced him to a craft he was now building a career on.
No award had ever landed like that sentence.
Another time, someone posted on Facebook: “I can’t thank Abrar bhaia enough for introducing me to this.”
That shook me in a way technical success never did. Because in those moments, I recognised something familiar.
It was her.
That same instinct my grandmother had — the need to pass knowledge forward — had quietly survived inside me. I just hadn’t named it yet.
That was when things started aligning.
Growing up, I learned differently because I had to. While many of my friends were in coaching centres, I was learning from the internet — YouTube lectures, forums, scattered tutorials. Some of the best teachers I ever had were people who didn’t know I existed, teaching for free, across oceans.
So I have a deep respect for what digital education can do. It removes gates. It creates luck where none existed.
But I’ve also felt its limits.
Information scales easily. Competence doesn’t. Watching is not the same as doing. And if your brain needs interaction, feedback, immersion — passive learning can make you feel broken when you’re not.
That gap matters to me because I’ve lived inside it.
EdTech, for me, isn’t about content. It’s about closing that loop — turning learning into something active, responsive, and human. Systems that let people practice, fail safely, get feedback, try again. The kind of environments where someone who struggles in traditional systems doesn’t automatically get labelled as less capable.
And in a strange way, all those scattered skills started making sense here. Storytelling helps me shape experiences. Programming lets me build systems. 3D and immersive tech let me create spaces you can step inside. Things that once felt disconnected began pointing in the same direction.
Especially now, when tools like AI and immersive tech can make learning feel present instead of distant.
So when I say EdTech is important to me, I don’t mean it as a trend or a career niche.
It’s personal.
It’s the classroom where I felt small. It’s the grandmother who refused to let that define me. It’s the quiet shock of realising that helping one person learn can matter more than any accolade.
In some ways, everything I build is an attempt to connect those dots.
I want to build the kinds of systems that would have helped the younger version of me — the kid standing in front of a class, stuck between words. And I want to extend what my grandmother was already doing in a small room, with limited time and no formal training — giving learning to whoever needed it.
If she taught with books and patience, maybe my version of that is building tools and systems.
That’s why EdTech isn’t just something I work in. It’s the direction where my past, my gratitude, and my sense of responsibility all point.
In a way, it’s the house I’ve been trying to build all along — using every skill I’ve collected — so that the next person who learns differently doesn’t have to feel alone while figuring it out.