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One Hundred
Tamils of the 20th Century
"Sujatha"
Rangarajan
3 May
1935 - 27 February 2008
Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram, Chair,
International Forum
for Information Technology in Tamil
(INFITT)
29 February 2008
 The polyvalent and gifted Tamil writer
"Sujatha" Rangarajan passed away in Chennai on 27
February 2008. It is a great loss for the entire
Tamil Disapora.
I had the pleasure of meeting Sujatha in 1995
for the first time and since then my admiration
for him and his capabilities have been growing
constantly. He was one of the most prolific Tamil
writers having written over a hundred novels
and twice that many short stories. He
contributed enormously to the Tamil Cinema world
as well as a script/dialogue writer and nearly
all leading Tamil movie directors sought his help
constantly.
We were together at the Tamil Internet Conference in 1997
organized at National University of Singapore by
late Naa.
Go and Prof. Tan Tin Wee. Staying in the same
hotel, we had long discussions on topics of
mutual interest. While there in the hotel, he
introduced me to Mr. Maalan, - friendship that I
still cherish very much.
A notable thing about Sujatha was his ease in
typing away novels straight on his laptop,
natively in Tamil Script. He was one of the first
Tamil Writers (as far as I know) to take active
interest in Tamil computing way back in the early
nineties and he used Tamil Text Editor
(Bharathi?) even in the early Win 3.x days.
While working for Bharath Electronics, Sujatha
was primarily responsible for the design and
development of "electronic voting machines
(EVMS)" that are being used widely now. As an
engineer with deep love for Tamil, Sujatha made
enormous efforts in talking to younger generation
students to take active interests in Science, in
Tamil and in Tamil Computing. He received an
award from the Indian National Council for
Science and Technology in 1993 for making the
people familiar with Science through public media
(books, magazines, TV).
Prof. George Hart of
University of California, Berkeley took an
initiative in 1996 to bring together some of the
leading Tamil writers to sensitize them on the
need for Tamils to use a standard font encoding.
Since his participation in this meeting Sujatha
engaged in active lobbying in Tamilnadu to use a
standard font encoding. He took active role in
the 1997 and 1999 Tamil Internet Conferences on
this topic. He was one of the key members of the
Tamilnadu Task Force of that time and contributed
to the IT standards that came out of Tamilnet99
conference (Tamilnet99 keyboard and TAB, TAM
bilingual encodings).
Sujatha was also one of the pioneers to
develop Tamil Portal sites, himself taking an
active role and responsibility in the development
of popular portal site " www.ambalam.com ". There he has
demonstrated his vast ocean of knowledge and
expertise by writing on diverse topics, starting
with his own commentary on works of early Sangam
period.
We can go on and on talking about Sujatha as
an individual and his phenomenal capabilities. We
all shall miss Sujatha. "
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