On my Journey with a Multi-Domain Expert Friend at SRM

 

I have always written about people who have influenced my life in some way or the other. People around us have a great impact on us knowingly or unknowingly. I always pick people who are likeminded in some aspect and I think this goes well with anyone on earth. While leaving TACOLA (Tamil Computing Lab, Anna University), I never ever thought it is not going to be so easy to make friends at workplace like I had there. What I learnt after joining SRM is that professional life shows you many likeminded people in terms of your work ethics and policies. I just earned a big list of friends that way, who have similar thought process to that of mine   and have helped me to grow along with them. I was just wowed by so many people who gave their hands around the globe who work in the same research field of mine and  lift me up and kept on believing me .This is what is  keeping me to move forward. Dr. Muthu Annamalai sir from U.S and Dr. Bharathi Raja Ashok sir from Ireland have shown a great support. I am thankful to them. There is a huge list of people at SRM and outside SRM  who show their support consistently and encourage me always .I will write about them all someday. I am only worried if I will hurt anyone; if I miss to mark anyone by mistake 😊. that is why delaying that right now 😊

 

In this process of making many professional friends, I really forgot to make friends at the workplace like I made during my UG, PG and TACOLA days. I was fine with it and felt so comfortable. Of course, my friends I made at my apartment are like the ones like I had during my school/college days. I really miss you ladies during this lockdown ☹ Those extended chats on Fridays, with our kids playing around, short trips. …. this Covid is bad ☹ We will win this and will catch up. And yes finally coming to the point. I was lucky enough to find a friend at workplace too like I had at school/college/TACOLA/apartment. This post is about that friend.

 That was my first hands-on Workshop as a resource person on NLP using Python on July 3^rd and 4^th 2019 at SRM Vadapalani Campus. Thanks to Dr.Fathimal ! Mam, you gave me the beginning and apart from you, I am happy to spot  two more likeminded people at SRM, Vadapalani campus, Dr. Prasanna Devi mam and Dr.Meenakshi Arya. I have inspired a lot from you both by the way you work. Thanks so much Dr.Fathimal for all this. Coming back to the NLP workshop , one of my colleagues, Mr.Karthick Nanmaran was also  invited for that workshop as a co -resource person. Since that was my first workshop experience, I never had a clue on how to deliver things. I just went by the flow of topics assigned to me. That was a two-day workshop. Me and Karthick divided the topics given to us. He was supposed to give session on the second day. Handling a workshop is totally different. You got to sense the audience pulse and should not be pre-determined and should be ready to change your plans accordingly. This I did not know. I finished my first introduction session and started to give hands-on session on POS tagger and Named entity tagger in Python. That is when some one in the audience said, they did not know Python but I was not ready for that and I myself was exploring Python afresh during that time. Someone stopped me in the middle  of the conversation and started teaching  the Python foundations for the participants. I did not feel even a bit of irritation rather felt very relaxed that things were going in the right direction. That someone is none other than my co-resource person, Karthick and I never knew  at that point that he is going to enlighten me much more. Here is the photograph that was taken at the end of the workshop.

Karthick is a very young (compared to me  😊), dynamic and  a multi-faceted person . He is a  tech savvy in many fields, Software Defined Networks, IOT, Kubernetes, NLP, Machine Learning etc etc. Mastering a single domain takes a lot of efforts and I am still wondering how this guy is into these much of fields. He has got a lot of good  Publications. He  has done his Masters in University of Edinburgh. He is a good teacher. I have seen many students discussing positively  about him in my  student whatsapp group . If possible do read his interview that he gave for a website when one his questions papers went viral on the web 😊https://www.thequint.com/neon/viral-exam-instructions-paper-srm-university-professor . I know him since 2017 as we both took Text Mining.  He gave a  hands-on session in  Python for all the Text Mining students during that time on a Saturday and that was an extra effort he gave to give more insight about the subject to the students. He even gave me an opportunity to talk on Machine Learning in one of the National Level workshops he organized at SRM in 2017. Do you remember this Karthick ? One day when I was  handling a lab session, You asked me if I can talk on TensorFlow and give an  intro on ML. I know I did not keep up your expectations in that talk. I shouldhave said no to that request 😊.

 

Then in 2018, we again took NLP together, but I never sensed a friend in him and yeah I said I almost forgot to make friends apart from professional friends at workplace after TACOLA.  Also Karthick had an additional tag  on him. He is the son of our Head of the Department, Dr.B.Amudha mam. Usually, these tags disturb me a lot. I have strange policies, so I don’t violate that for any reason.  Of course, that tag was not made visible by Karthick at any point of time and the problem was much with my perception 😊 I know I am strange. Coming to that NLP workshop at Vadapalani campus in 2019, that’s when it hit me that this person is very nice and had so much of similarities with my TACOLA friends.  He resembles a lot of my TACOLA  friend, Radhakrishnan  in  terms of both looks and character.

Karthick is my Python guru. We both gave one more hands-on workshop  at the EEE department of our University.  Without him those workshops would not have served the purpose and he gave me a clarity on how a hands-on Workshop should be conducted. He already had so much of workshop experiences. The foundations that he gave me  on Python and on clarity on how to conduct workshops gave a lot of confidence to me later.  Also we both worked on projects on Speech recognitions. We used to explore on Tamil computing tools.We started a github project named, "Karmughil". Also we tried getting funds for these projects and we wrote proposals together.  We targeted to submit to Tamil Virtual Academy(TVA) and they asked us few requirements so we have spent one full half day sitting on the  stone benches of Anna university , CEG campus  editing those proposals / coding speech recognition ( TVA is next to CEG campus and we preferred sitting under the tree at CEG:) . I seek a lot of compatibility while working and I have found a lot of coherent thoughts coming out of both of us while writing those proposals. I am going to really miss this Karthick. The way we write proposals in vey few hours, even patent documents. I am doubting if I will get such a compatible co-researcher. Good Luck to me :)

 I strongly believe in the mantra, "Judge a Character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him" Many would have seen this in my Whatsapp status and this has been my Blog’s caption for more than a decade. This is the easy mantra I always use to judge people. People who exhibit consistent behaviors are trustworthy.  Karthick is high on values, he is very down to earth. He recently wrote a book for Oxford publisher on Data structures using  Python . I am surprised of how a person can be like him holding on to ground despite many feathers on his cap. Anyone who sees his twitter profile would judge him as an anti-Indian(LOL). He gets angry on a lot of political discrepancies and raise questions but that is only a bit of him . Yeah any social media webpage only depicts a very small proportion of a person 😊

Karthi,( that’s how I call him as that “ik” at the end  was not coming easily for me so I decided this way 😊)  you are one of the blessed souls and I will surely miss you in the campus. When I was in TACOLA, going to canteen for tea twice a day was a ritual. I almost forgot to have a teatime at SRM and It was you who would drag me to canteen, at times, for tea. I realized after 4 years that our Java green tea shops deliver such a nice ginger tea.  I really enjoyed our Tamil virtual Academy visits. CEG has a lot of lifetime emotion within me and thanks for giving me  company to have food at CEG canteen during our TVA visits :)We tried our level best to get that proposal but sad that we could not get that. Never mind.  You taught me many things right from Python and even on how to be composed towards people who do not align with our policies. Thanks for taking all my nonsense. None at SRM, know that I get angry as I don’t vent my anger other than people at home and to my close friends.  I know departures are part of life and we got to accept that  and I am very well used to it and I also know that some people would never leave out of our life/mind  no matter what. 

 I wish you a fantastic happy life ahead. I always say this to  you that you  are meant to strike big. I strongly believe in that and please try to pull out the best version out of you.  Keep rocking and flap your feathers towards the pinnacle for which you are destined for!

 

Thanks to the souls who patiently read this 😊

 

Subalalitha