Dr. C. Mohan in conversation with Prof. R. Nagarajan
Good morning, Mohan. Welcome to Heritage Centre.
Thank you, Nags.
So, we will mainly talk about your days here at IIT
even you are a student,
but before we do that just give us a little bit of a history of
how you got into IIT and then what you have been
doing since you left IIT. Ok.
Interestingly enough even though my
mom’s first cousin Professor V. Rama Murthy
was a faculty member in Mechanical Engineering.
Somehow I didn’t know about IIT until
I was about to apply for pre-university course
and then one of my high school best buddies said hey,
you should go join Loyola College because they have this
coaching for a month before the
JEE for IIT and I am like what is IIT?
So, anyway, that is how it started out and then of course,
my parents said why do you want to go to Chennai
and study there when we have set up shop in Vellore?
For purely the kids education.
So, then finally, my dad says ok whichever comes first
Voorhees College in Vellore or Loyola in Chennai
I should take it up
and luckily for me the Loyola College one came up
and so, at that time it was just one month, one hour
each day in the morning before regular classes
Math, Physics, Chemistry being covered in these things.
So, that is how I wound up getting
to become aware of IIT and then you know
get prepared in terms of the JEE.
And, it was like sheep mentality at the time right
based on what rank you got you know the
top choice was Electronics, next was Chemical.
So, my rank was such that
I went into that not because of any particular
interest in Chemical Engineering as supposed to
some other branch of Engineering.
But, then as many people know when I was
starting my second year, it is 1973 is when the
IBM mainframe came as a gift to IIT Madras,
from West Germany and I got hooked
and the rest is kind of history in the sense of
my spending all my spare time and more
hanging around in the Computer Centre
and I had the benefit of IIT letting even undergraduates
who had from a curriculum perspective
no business going anywhere near the computer. Right.
Unlimited access so.
And since I left IIT in ‘77 of course,
with all the 4 years of heavy duty learning about computers
and such I had made up my mind
especially starting from the third year
that I was going to do a Ph.D in Computer Science.
But between the beginning of the second year
and the third year
I thought I will do a Ph.D in management science
because to begin with I was using lot of these
application packages that were
available on that mainframe system.
But, then there was some special feature
I was trying to use in a simulation package
where the software kept crashing and that is when
sitting at home in the summer of 1974, I was debugging this
software and that is when I said the macho thing to do
is to do a Ph.D in Computer Science
and get into hardcore nuts and bolts low level
hardware as well as software kind of thing.
But, I still graduated only in the software space
in terms of my Ph.D work.
I didn’t really do any hardware oriented work.
So, and after graduation of course,
from my Ph.D I joined IBM research
and I have been there ever since 38 years of being part of the
IBM research division. Right.
Primarily in San Jose,
but I did spend about 32 months in Bangalore
as the IBM India Chief Scientist and also
for 1 year I did a sabbatical in Paris
at a French Computer Science Research Institute.
It was from 1998 to 99. Ok.
So, going back to your days at on campus,
what are your some of your best memories
you know maybe take it year wise first year, what you were?
First year I was more of a normal guy
in the sense that when I joined Loyola College
for my pre-university in 1971
that was the first time I started playing tennis.
As opposed to during my high school days in Vellore
playing cricket and being a member of the Vellore Cricket Club.
So, when I came to IIT in 72
that first year I regularly went to OAT movies,
I used the tennis courts here and so on.
But, once the second year started and I got sucked into
Computer Science related stuff as a side activity,
it began to dominate my psyche so much
that I stopped doing anything else.
I didn’t even hang around as much with my own batchmates
let alone others in the hostel and also in terms of hostel
I was in Alaknanda to begin with and I should have
as a Chemical Engineering guy gone to Godavari in 70.
You had the 1 plus 4 model right?
Yeah, right exactly, but at the time they
did not have enough space in Godavari.
So, some of us got sent to Saraswati,
but then from the third year onwards I was in Godavari.
So, I did you know spent some amount of time
with my batchmates and others in the hostel,
but really not the normal kind of time
that others would have done.
Because I got to know more of the Master students
who were in Computer Science
because when the Computer Centre was started in 73
they started with the Masters program and also the PhD program,
but undergraduate degrees in Computer Science
didn't begin anywhere in India to my knowledge until
late 70s early 80s.
So, of course, the campus and you know
Mardi Gras all those sorts of things
have left a lasting impression on me.
Mardi Gras is now called Saarang yeah.
And, also you know being close enough to my parents
who are living in Vellore just 80–85 miles I wound up
as a Tamil guy spending my entire pre-Ph.D days life in
Tamil Nadu except for holidays going to some other parts of India.
But, also I didn’t learned Hindi in school because
by the time I would have normally had
Hindi education in high school
the Tamil Nadu Government went from being
Congress Government to DMK and so, the
three language formula became two-language formula,
but my mother still thought I should learn Hindi and so
I had to go to Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha to learn.
And, some of that knowledge I could have kept up
while I was in IIT if only I had hung around enough with the Right.
my classmates or even others that were more into
Hindi speaking, but I just didn’t.
Of course, we are just had our own
vernacular rate we had that campus.
Oh yeah of course, of course, that is true too.
But, I do think that you know the
whole cosmopolitan student body is a the big plus.
Yeah, yeah definitely.
No question about that.
But, in fact, interestingly enough it is when I went to
America to Austin Texas for my Ph.D that I actually
started feeling very bad about having not having kept up my
Hindi knowledge because there the Indian community was
so small that everybody automatically assumed that
everybody will know Hindi. Right.
So, and also even movies that were being shown over
there were Hindi movies with no subtitles to begin with.
So, I actually tried hard to revive my [laughter] Hindi knowledge,
but then soon after the subtitles in English started coming.
So, I was less motivated then.
So, anyway that is the.
How was your workshop experience, sir?
That was pretty tough, right because
at that time in the first year 50 percent of the time
every other week we spent entirely in the workshop
and in the second year one day of every week
we spent in the workshop.
So, it did you know, make life here very different
compared to some of my contemporaries
in other engineering colleges and so on
or even in other IITs for that matter .
But, I do not know whether in my case it left
any lasting impression in the sense of being very hands on guy
because even you know much later in life at home and so on
my wife complains that I am not doing
enough of the things myself.
Like the professionals do it that's why.
But as an engineer I suppose
and I am supposed to be expected to be more hands
on than I have wound up being.
Yeah, just supervise.
The other subject lot of people remember is of course
drawing, Engineering Drawing
which also used to be pretty painful and,
but you are ok with the drawing.
Yeah, you see it is been so long that some of these things
have sort of been being
sent out of the cache in my head you know.
So, so, you know it is already what 42 plus years
since I graduated 1977 is when I
Finished my Bachelor’s Degree.
So, lot more things have come into my immediate attention,
scope and so on so, some of those memories are not as vivid,
but these days you know it is interesting when I look
at the WhatsApp group of my classmates, some of the guys
were able to recall even dorm room numbers and the roll number
and such things so vividly and they are also talking about
various workshop employees
and so on extremely well and so, I feel bad.
Is my brain so messed up compared to these
other guys at least in terms of memory? lost memories.
make up names and.
No, but then there are these other guys
who are also you know at times pointing out some
errors in this recollection and so on.
So, it is quite amazing how some people have such selective
Sure. memory about some of these sorts of things
and in my case that is not the situation.
So. Any memories about the department?
Chemical Engineering all I remember is
you know Ananth teaching Thermodynamics
and of course, later on long after
I left he became the Director
and then I am forgetting Gopinath was there.
Was there a Govinda Rajalu?
Govinda Rajalu, I don’t remember.
No, see again you know in my case I am a bad example,
right because I was essentially trying to get away
with the minimal amount of work in Chemical Engineering,
so much so that my parents when they noticed
how much time I was spending in
in the Computer Centre and even my name C. Mohan was
interpreted as Computer Mohan.
My parents thought that I might even flunk
my Chemical Engineering with all the enthusiasm
I was showing on Computer Science.
So, in that sense I do not have as much of an attachment to the
department in the sense of
after I left coming back and interacting with the
staff members, but there was one Chemical Engineering professor
who had become a Computer Science person
and that was Professor Nagarajan your name sake,
but he was an older gentleman of course.
So, he was one of the few faculty members in
in Computer Science after the computer came here the
mainframe that encouraged my craziness of
spending so much time on something
that wasn’t supposed to be my focus at IIT .
The major one being of course, Professor C. R. Muthu Krishnan.
Who was one of the two faculty members who came from
IIT, Kanpur to start the Computer Centre and the
other one being Professor Mahabala.
So, Muthu was ultimately my
project advisor even for my B.Tech project.
So, even that project I didn’t do in Chemical Engineering.
So, in so many ways I was the oddball guy
that was nominally a Chemical Engineering student,
but in fact, I wasn’t. Did you get into trouble in the department because of that?
No, actually strangely enough
they even permitted me to do this B.Tech project in Computer Science.
So, in that sense I got lucky and so in many ways
I used to feel originally that unlike the
IIT Kanpur administration based on the fact that
Kanpur was started with US assistance
gave the students lot more flexibility.
So, the only thing I could have done in a formal sense
in IIT Madras as an undergraduate student
in the area of Computer Science was in the
eighth or the ninth semester as a Mathematics option
I could have taken Fortran programming as a course
and that would have been the only formal
grade qualifying entry I would have had in my mark sheet.
But then since I had started programming
in the third semester this didn’t make.
Because things are very different now as I am
sure you know you know there is so much flexibility now.
Chemical Engineering student can get a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering
and an M.Tech in Data Science you know integrated
5 year program I see
or you can do a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering with a
minor in Computer Science.
So, there is just large number of ways in which- Yeah.
So, we didn’t didn’t have a notion of minor at all, right during?
No, we didn’t. And even in your time?
No. You are about 3 years, 81.
Yeah. 4 years junior to me, right.
So, yeah definitely I mean it is just that I was here at a time when
I suppose because of the West German idea of
what undergraduates should do it was a
more strict kind of way of deciding who gets to do what.
But, at the same time I was also extremely pleased
that not only the Computer Centre administration
but even the rest of the admin people in IIT Madras
allowed somebody like me to
have unlimited access to the mainframe.
And so, to that extent I am forever grateful to
the people in IIT Madras that let guys like me exist
and not get penalized in any sense.
In fact, I was quite surprised when I finally
managed to get out with a 7.5 GPA
is that the term or CPA? CGPA.
Now now I think it was originally credit point average. Yeah.
Yeah and that was just barely making it in first class. Right.
7.5 was the minimum we had to get to get a first class
and so, I was ok with that.
Although you know lots of other people obviously
got much higher CPAs than I what I got,
but the saving grace for me was once I started doing
Computer Science I managed to get out with a I think 3. 95 out of 4.
No only one course where I got the B
dragged me down to a none 4.2 grade point average.
So, yeah that is about it.
What was the food like?
I mean what is your memories of the-
A food, I don’t recall a whole lot.
I mean again I suppose I was not that much
hung up about food and such.
I mean I was a vegetarian and I am still a vegetarian.
So, I was ok with it.
I mean even now I am not so particular about
what I eat and such as long as
it fills my stomach I am more or less ok.
There aren't too many things that I say I just can’t
I I won’t eat because I don’t like the taste or whatever.
More and more of course, you know certain things
I am avoiding just because it doesn’t seem to suit me physiologically,
but other than that life in IIT, I mean I got so crazy at
one point that I even avoided going to the OAT
movies thinking I should spend even
that time learning more about some Computer Science geeky things.
Do you have any regrets about your time at IIT, Madras?
Not really the the only thing I could presumably have done
better is as I was saying earlier kept up my Hindi knowledge
and gotten to know a bit more about people
that came from other parts of India
to learn more about their states
and their culture and so on.
Interestingly enough it was for the first time in Austin,
the first summer over there, summer of 78 that some of the
Gujarati women there dragged me on to the stage to perform
in Raas and Bhangra and such things
and I had never been on stage in my time at IIT
and even in high school,
the school I went to was not one of those sorts of
all round kinds of schools in Vellore,
the Krishnaswamy Mudaliar High School.
So, it was more academic focus that was dinned into me.
So, in that sense you know even my roommate in Austin
for a couple of years was a Maharashtrian guy.
So, my- if you like appreciation
for other parts of India, expanded during my time
in the US than while I was here.
Even though as I was saying at the beginning
I did spend summer vacations in Baroda
and Calcutta and places like that.
But, I didn’t really spend too much time on the cultural side
and artistic side and things like that.
So, in that sense I didn’t have if you like
kind of more all round kind of appreciation for non-technical.
You are a Computer nerd.
Yeah, especially during IIT days,
but even before you know it’s not like I tried to pursue,
I don’t know, Carnatic music
or Western music or any of those sorts of things,
but later of course, more because of my wife,
my kids wound up getting all sorts of stuff
forced on them to begin with at least.
And then of course, they started liking it and
so, they went quite a bit into the arts compared
to my own upbringing and so on.
So, as a as a as an ex-IBM or I should
I have to ask you this- Sure.
what parables do you see between IIT Madras
and IBM as an organization, do you see any?
Interesting, I had not thought about.
I mean I don’t know maybe from a leadership viewpoint or from-
See of course, the difference is one is a commercial
organization in the case of IBM and of course,
since in my case at least I have been all my life
in the IBM Research Division in many ways that’s like
being in academia and of course, you are a great example of a
person who is spanned both sides.
In my case in a formal sense I have not been a
faculty member anywhere although for the last three years
and continuing into the next three years,
I have this position as a distinguished visiting professor at
one of China’s pre-eminent universities namely Tsinghua University.
So, in terms of IIT of course,
the great thing that has happened long after I left
is the establishment of the IITM Research Park
and the increased focus in faculty members also getting involved in
trying to get some of their research output
getting commercialized and so on.
So, in in such ways you could say that
there is more similarity now between
let’s say IIT Madras and IBM research people
because as research people we have had to also have our challenge,
we have had to face the challenge of doing
technology transfer of the research ideas into IBM products.
So, in some ways that’s like academics
who are doing research work, trying to make their ideas
see the light of day and so,
now there is more such similarity
if you like between IBM and IIT Madras.
I don’t know if you have some other kinds of things in mind.
No, I think you know I I just think they are about
top class organizations.
Yeah of course, that that’s definitely the case Yeah.
independent of the its academic focus or a
product kind of focus or trying to move the state of the art
in a dramatic way in certain dimensions and so on. Right.
So, of course, you received your distinguished
Alumnus Award a few years ago. 2003.
2003. Yeah.
What was your I mean reaction
when you first learned that you were receiving the award
and then you actually received the award
what what were your memories?
I was quite pleased obviously, you know it is like
nice to hear from your alma mater that they think
you have done something you know worthy of that kind of
honour being bestowed on you,
but I was unsure whether the nominal department
that I was attached to namely Chemical Engineering
would feel excited about this or not because
I didn’t really continue that area of work or study and so on,
after I left the campus.
But, then again I thought Computer Science people
might not feel they have any special attachment
to you especially because by that time I think if my
memory serves me right both Mahabala and Muthu Krishnan
were no longer regular faculty members here.
Muthu might have been still an adjunct faculty member,
I am not sure and I did not know too many of the other people
that long after I left gotten into Computer Science.
So, if my memory serves me right actually somebody from
Chemical Engineering came and handed me the-
Yeah, that’s a tradition that the Head of the Department
from which you have graduated has to read your citation and stuff. Yeah.
So, it was nice.
Of course, I would have been even happier had that award
come the previous year because for the first time
we had our reunion that was my Silver Reunion 2002.
So, it did not happen that year even though
the application had been put in by some colleague of mine.
So, that would have been nice because then you know
because at that time unlike now I think the awards used to be
given out during these sorts of reunions in December. Ok.
So, I was thinking wow, wouldn't it have been nice
if you know it was done with about 85 or
so of the 250 graduates
so, 77 year. Yeah, we still announce the awards at the reunion,
but the they are actual giving up the award. I see. I see.
Is in April in on institute.
Yeah so, but of course, because there are lot of my classmates
who are still in Chennai who never even left Chennai in terms of
once I started working and so on moving somewhere else.
So, quite a good number of my classmates
did attend the award function
and so, it was thrilling and my parents also were there
and even my sister came and so on.
So, but my family was not here, meaning my immediate family.
But, they were with me when we had the Silver Reunion.
So, that is the only time in fact, both my kids
and my wife attended the reunions because
they didn’t come for the subsequent 30th, 35th, so on reunions.
And, I myself didn’t attend after the 30th reunion,
the 35th and the 40th ones,
but we are going to have a cruise come
end of March in the US,
whole bunch of people are coming for that.
So, I am looking forward to that.
And how about the IBM fellowship, I mean how was that?
So, that was very nice that happened in 1997.
So, just about 15 years after I joined the companies
when that happened and that was quite a
thrilling thing for me to see
that kind of recognition coming especially
because while it is not a record in terms of the number of years
after one joins the company to get the IBM fellowship,
its less than the average number of years.
So, so in that sense I really felt extremely happy about that especially
since for an IBM-er who has chosen even to this day to be a non-manager
this is like the pinnacle of technical career in IBM to get the IBM fellowship.
So, and I also had more or less stuck to the same area of work
instead of moving even as a technical person to dramatically
different areas as some people do.
And, so, for me that award and the year before
the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award which is given for database people
were really you know extremely pleasing kinds of
recognition to be offered by the community of
database people across the globe in the case of the
1996 ACM SIGMOD Award in 97 by IBM people,
the immigrant fellowships so.
So, going back to your student days did you have
any run-ins with the administration?
Did you ever get to meet the directors?
I don’t think I had any
slaps on my wrist by administration
because of any bad behaviour or anything.
I might have actually met the Deputy Director,
Professor Sampath used to be the Deputy Director
and he had of course, Electrical Engineering kind of
background having got his Masters at Stanford.
But, in terms of both Professor Ramachandran,
who was the Director when I joined and a few years later
when Professor Pandalai took over,
I am not sure if I even met them once each one.
At least I don’t recall now, although I used to be extremely
active in terms of not just campus kinds of activities,
I was the Secretary of the Computer Club in my fourth year
and the President of the Computer Club in the fifth year.
And, I used to interact with even people outside of IIT
that were big name people in the Computer Science area
people that were considered like pioneers;
Professor Nataraj I mean Colonel Natarajan
whose two kids were juniors of mine here
and who also subsequently came to UT Austin to do their PhDs,
and also professor Narasimhan
who ran on the Computer group in TIFR
and later when this National Centre for
Software and Computer Technologies
was formed it was called NCSDCT.
And, there was Major General Bala Subramanyam
these three people were even though they were not by training
Computer Science people they were one of the they were as
amongst a small number of people who had gotten into
the Computer field in India early on and so
I was in that sense very active even though
I wasn’t in a formal sense a Computer Science person.
And, so, in that sense I did, you know,
network a lot and things like that which all helped me later on
and also made me feel in many ways attached to India.
Even though IBM as a company had left India in 1978,
at the same time that Coca Cola left, and IBM
didn’t come back to India until 1992 and even then it came back
as a joint venture with the Tata’s.
But even during that 78 to 92 period,
almost on every trip I made to India, I tried to go give talks
both at universities as well as in various commercial establishments.
And, so, I kept up my contacts with the Computer
community in particular in India during my entire professional career.
And of course, it all became even more serious
when in June 2006 I came to India as the
IBM India Chief Scientist, a position they created
which didn’t exist before and and initially
it was supposed to be for 24 months
but then they extended it for 8 more months.
So, until January, 2009, I was based in Bangalore
and I took it upon myself during that period to not only
go around colleges big ones,
but even small ones and also to go to other companies
and talk about long term technical careers
and how they are important for us to move beyond
doing mundane work to you know,
move of the food chain and do more innovative work
and things like that and establish the notion of a
technical ladder and not make everybody think
if they do not become managers
they haven’t made it in life.
So, in your graduating class
how many went abroad for higher studies? What percent of?
My recollection is that out of the 250 or so,
out of which strangely enough there were only three women
maybe about one-fourth went abroad.
Later on of course, even some of the other people showed up,
but of course, that has changed dramatically
from what I gather a lot. 100 percent.
Yeah. So, that is a good thing and, but then that concern
I had was and I used to talk about this can India become an
innovation superpower because this idea of giving
such a presentation came up because
the UC Santa Cruz people had a South Asian kind of program
and they were asking people to come
and talk about India related topics
and this happened during my India tenure in Bangalore.
So, my point was even if the brain drain is not happening,
does that mean that these people that would have
otherwise gone abroad are they still pursuing an academic
career in terms of at least getting degrees like Masters and PhD
are or they just merely going into the professional
career path or as it used to happen even during my time
a good percentage of these people go in for MBAs
at IIMs and then they no longer even work as technical people. Right.
They become management material.
So, I felt that it probably was a problem for both
the foreign countries that used to benefit from
Indians going abroad as well as India because
people just had these easy to get jobs
especially when IT became so dominant in the
Indian scene even non-Computer Science
background people were able to get IT jobs.
I felt that in some sense it didn’t help
anybody that not enough of the people
who are pursuing higher studies and doing research.
I don’t know what your.
I think there is there is a fine balance you have to strike
somewhere I think maybe right now it’s too low.
But, was that like a scientific process for selecting universities,
you know I remember this tapping?
was a was a very very systematic exercise.
The students used to get together and divide up the Universities and. No.
So, in my time there wasn’t this notion of people going
and writing GRE and coming back and recalling
what the questions were and then preparing this
whatever this binder kind of thing, I didn’t even know
that that was being done after I left.
I don’t know after how long after I left
and that this had become like a way in
which a lot of the people here prepared for-
Actually what I am talking about is selection of the university.
No, no I I understand.
So, so this particular thing I didn’t know about,
but I also found out unlike in my time that subsequently
there was this attempt to divvy up who applies to which university.
To my knowledge in my time there was no such thing.
So, the level of sophistication if you like of trying to make sure
that the the top rankers don’t wind up applying to gazillion
universities and they all give them admission.
And then the each one is able to go to only one university in the end
and then they the process mess up the lives for the
sort of the next ring kind of students,
I don’t think that level of sophistication was applied in
my time for people to
try to make it a win-win for at least a significant
number of people in the upper ranks if you like.
So, I was- when I later on found out about all that I was like wow,
these guys have made it into an art form how to-
A science not even.
But then I also at the same time started hearing
from some of the US University people, meaning faculty members
that they had come to know about this and
so, they stopped giving importance to the GREs course of
especially people from institutions like IIT Madras
and maybe the other IITs also and they started
relying more and more on the reference letters from the faculty here
as being more reliable indicators of how good these people are.
You mentioned that there were hardly any female students Yeah.
when you were here.
So, how did that affect you after you graduated?
Well, I don’t know about after graduation,
but during the time in contrast to what the story was at
IIT Madras I used to feel very envious of the
guys across the street in Guindy Engineering,
where if my memory shows me right in all of Madras University
that was the only Engineering College where women were admitted.
So, they had something like 50 women in their
batch that came in in 72 whereas,
we had 3 women and so, I was like this is unfair.
I don’t think it affected me in any way seriously.
No, but I also like I said I got too engrossed in
all this Computer Science thing
so, I was not pursuing in any romantic way any of these women.
So, had I been you know motivated differently
maybe I would have felt even-
So, you are romancing the silicon so-
Yeah, not even the silicon more software right
because I wasn’t really a hardware kind of guy.
So, yeah so, and I was quite crazy in many ways like
that even when I went to,
I remember one time to Baroda for my
Summer Internship to the refinery in Baroda.
I still did it as a Chemical Engineer guy, believe it or not.
One day I went to Ahmadabad, instead of spending the
day sightseeing I went to the library there and started looking at
what they have in terms of Computer Science books and such.
So, in that in many ways like that it was quite
an abnormal case.
Did you have an industry tour when you were student?
Did you go? No.
Like All India.
I don’t even recall such a thing being done.
There was one yeah yeah. Did you have it?
Really? I didn’t even know. So, we went to Goa and supposedly to
Chemical factories which we never went near,
but yeah we went all over the place.
Ok, somehow I don’t recall my making a conscious
decision not to go on such a thing,
so, but one thing that I do remember ok.
So, that is in going back to one of your earlier questions.
I was in the Air Force Wing of NCC and I also
I think that might have been during
my pre-university day in Loyola.
What was the other thing?
National Service Core, NSC.
So, I took part in that too.
So, as part of this NCC Air Force Wing in IIT,
we were taken on a camp trip to Bangalore
and as part of that I forget now how long it was
10 days or whatever stay in the
Madras Engineering Service or some
such unit of the Army I think.
That’s where in their bunkers or
whatever is where we were put up,
we were given a joyride.
in an aircraft.
So, that is the only time I had ever been on an aircraft
until I was flying from here to Delhi to
Tehran to Paris to New York to Austin. Wow.
On my trip out of India for the first time
and I had never gone abroad also.
So, for me all this was like totally
different kind of experience.
And, but at the same time I should say that when I
was going to Austin all I knew in terms of even
Texas as a whole was based on the movies
I saw here in OAT right, western movies.
And so, I was expecting Austin to be like any other city
in Texas and it was such a pleasant surprise to go there
and find that Austin is so different – hill country, greenery, river, Yeah.
non-redneck kind of place because it was primarily
at the time a university town and a capital of the state.
We just spent 3 days there to the end of December early there.
Wow, nice.
So, so in many such ways for me the IIT life
and what it brought about in terms of my future and so on
those are extremely pleasant memories and
things that I appreciate a lot.
And, I constantly talk about not just IIT by the way.
Whenever I see Germans, especially Germans
who come from the western part of Germany
I don’t forget to acknowledge what that country
did to my career and future and so on.
In particular, I remember the German Minister
for Economic Cooperation I think there is a
photo of that person in the the. Collection.
You have in the Heritage Centre,
he in his remarks during the inauguration of the
Computer Centre which happened a few months
after the actual operational usage of the Computer Centre started.
He said not too many
German, West German Universities at that time
could boast of having such a machine.
Even though, when we now look back its crazy
this machine had 256 K of memory
and it took something like 7 to 8 hours for
a compilation to be done of the program
you had to punch in cards and. All FORTRAN, right?
Yeah. So, but the fact that West Germans
you know didn't give priority to all their universities
before donating machines to institutions abroad
is something that, at least in my life
came at the right time and made a huge difference
as to what I chose to pursue as a result of my exposure
starting from my second year to that mainframe. Right.
So, we should probably conclude. Sure, thank you.
Thanks for taking the time and thanks to Kumaran
and the others for giving me this opportunity to talk about
and reminisce about my past year.
Thank you.
Thanks Mohan.
- Contribute
to the Centre -
Monetary
Support 
Digital
Material
