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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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