Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

freinds,
there has never been any dearth of savants,saints,scholars hailing from chidambaram. the last person is venkataramn ramakrishnan. he was living in the western part of the town known as the ananddheesar koil agraharam. he was doing PUC from annamalai 1968(he left then to gujarat) his class mate dr.radhika is a prof in biochemistry in annamalai now. his teacher mr.govindaraj is still living in vilangiamman koil stret.

annamalai has produced a nobel laureate atlast(after 90 years). in chidambaram we can only wonder the sociology. nobel laureates and vagrants walk tall side by side. hhere extremes of humanism can be seen just like that. just when i was thinking about the dissapearence of a malgudi like character of the town came this news. iam once again back to the RKNARAYAN’S vision of the malgudi in our peculiar town called chidambaram.

tomarrow i may see a banian-dhoti clad person walking in the car street bare foot,who on questioning would say he is a nobel laureate.
nobody will be disturbed by a VIP like him because chidambaram has seen several such greats in its 1800 existance and never cared to bother them either. that is chidambaram!

gandhiram

Actually i’d very much like to know if this Venkataraman whom we are so proud of actually acknowledges his roots and maintains some contact with teacher or old school/collegues. It would be most heart warming to know if he did.

Sad to say but most people who make it big are ashamed of their roots. It is a feeling i have wondered and puzzled about many times…we are talking of the great RKN..RKN loved to be referred to as a mysorean/kannadiga far less than a chennai based tamil. His brother RKL was much much worse. My father always used to tease him that sir it is just that quality of yours that i cannot understand…:))

Malathi

http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/09/stories/2009100951810700.htm

CHENNAI: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the Tamil Nadu-born winner of the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, kept his connections with India and the State alive in
recent years – not only to deliver scientific lectures, but also to listen
to classical music in the sabhas of Chennai.

Most of his scientific career has been in the U.S. and the U.K. In the last
decade Dr. Ramakrishnan revived his academic links with the land of his
birth, and started collaborating with Indian institutions and interacting
with Indian students and faculty. “After a long gap, he came for the
Biophysics Society meeting at the University of Madras and delivered the
G.N. Ramachandran Memorial lecture [in 2002],” said biotechnologist M.
Vijayan, president of the Indian National Science Academy and an honorary
Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, who had chaired that meeting.

P.K. Ponnuswamy, an expert in Biophysics and former Vice-Chancellor of the
Madras and Madurai Kamaraj universities, remembers that visit, when Dr.
Ramakrishnan impressed the scientific community with his presentation. “The
slide presentation was a result of very hard work. Working on ribosomes is a
very complex task.

He was an authority on the subject even then,” said Dr. Ponnuswamy.

The symposium organisers offered him an honorarium for the lecture, but he
politely declined and instead wanted the university to use it for other
purposes.

In December 2008, he visited the University of Madras again at the
invitation of the Department of Biophysics to deliver lectures on ribosome
structure.

“During his interaction with us, he was appreciative of the work being done
by our university such as techniques being used in X-ray Crystallography,”
said N. Gautham, a Professor in the department. “He showed keen interest in
the work being done by our faculty and students. There were long hours of
discussions in the lab, exchanging ideas and expertise on current areas of
research.”

He showed keen interest in classical music and found time to listen to
concerts at various sabhas during visits to Chennai.

“He told us that he is interested in music and wanted to spend time in The
Music Academy,” says Dr. Gautham.

Although he was born in the temple town of Chidambaram, he spent much of his
youth in Gujarat, where his father was Head of the Department of
Biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara).
Dr. Ramakrishnan, known to friends and colleagues as ‘Venki’, earned a B.Sc
in Physics from that university in 1971.

The university’s Head of the Department of Physics, A.C. Sharma, fondly
recalls his visit to the university three years ago.

“He delivered a talk on his subject and freely interacted with our students
and faculty,” said Dr. Sharma.

Last year, the Indian National Science Academy elected him as a foreign
fellow, while the IISc convinced him to accept its G.N. Ramachandran chair a
few years ago.

http://www.poetryinstone.in

Here the language of stone surpasses the language of man

Some more info:

He was put in a girls school in Baroda.
He graduated with a B.Sc. in physics(?)
Keeps in touch with his old teachers from Baroda, who were his father’s
colleagues.
He keeps in close touch with Badrukwala, also from MS University,
Baroda, who lost his son in the Gujarat riots; recently a film made on
his life was not released in Gujarat, even though not banned by the
local government. The distributors/ theater owners voluntarily banned
the film. Venki contributes money to the charity run by Bandrukwala -
educating poor muslim girls.
He has visited India only three time in first 30 years; of late he
visits oftener and spends more time. He is interested in karnatic music.

Surprisingly, there is no whiff of news about his family – married or
not/ wife and children.
He looks very simple and humble; even his lab/office in Cambridge is
small, untidy and cluttered with jars, bottles and books – a refreshing
environment.

All the three tamil nobel laureates have the ‘venkataraman’ connection,
in the name.

Sampath

what humble beginnings!! Truly inspiring )

Rahul you must check out the culture of Portland/Seattle/Washington DC too, lot of parellels with coffee shops and intellectualism. WAshington espcially with its political culture and lot of celebrities around is a very interesting place.

More:

He shifted to Cambridge from univ. of Utah at a lesser salary. Utah was
ready to increase his salary to increase the differential and tempt him
to stay back; but he moved to Cambridge, because the environment in
Cambridge was better and long term funding for his project was uncertain
in US (considered high risk category).

He did not accept the honorarium offered for a lecture in Madras Univ;
wanted the money to be spent in univ activities.

Sampath