Aviral Dasgupta with mother Madhumita and principal of Loyola School Father Victor in jamshedpur on Thursday. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Jamshedpur, March 17: He dreams Java, breathes C++. And at 16, he has cracked the Google code.

Aviral Dasgupta is a part of an elite tribe of cub programmers for which Google is not a search engine but a collection of some of the greatest codes on cyber space. And now, this Class X student of Loyola School is one of the 14 top global winners of the Google Code-In contest.

What the boy wonder from upscale Jubilee Road is most excited by is that as a winner, he gets to visit his dream address. Come June, and Aviral, with mom Madhumita, will head to Googleplex, headquarters of the world’s top search engine, at Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California. He and the other 13 winners will also receive their trophies there.

“It is a dream come true,” the teen geek beams, wearing the jazzy black T-shirt that was a part of his goodie bag from Google. “There’s also USD 500 in prize money,” he adds as an afterthought. “But the best part is the California trip to see my dream workplace,” he says, adding that he wants to crack the Scholastic Aptitude Test and join an Ivy League college.

Google Code-In aims to introduce students between 13 and 18 years to various kinds of open-source software development. About 361 students from 48 countries participated in the seven-week contest that concluded on January 10. While the other Indian winner this year is Gautam Gupta of New Delhi, youngsters in the top 14 belong to Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Romania, Austria, The Netherlands, New Zealand and the US. Countries with the highest number of participants were the US, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, India, Poland, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Australia.

Participants had to write or re-factor codes, create or edit documents, handle community management and outreach or marketing, test codes for high quality, study a problem and recommend solutions, and finally, help others learn more.

Aviral contributed to a programme called “Tux4Kids”, an infotainment software for kids. After his success, Aviral is a permanent developer of the Tux4kids team. He also programmed a game, Factoroids, and designed its VideoLAN.

He’s also clearly a mould-breaker. “If I work for a company, it will be Google. But the idea of being a freelance consultant appeals to me,” he said.

Dad Dipankar, an executive with Tata Steel, and mom Madhumita, an English teacher at Loyola School, are understandably thrilled. Sister Ishani, in Class I, is perhaps too young to understand dada’s success.

And what else is he up to when he is not at the keyboard? “I read and also write creatively,” he said. Clearly, mom’s creative code at work.