It's indeed a very solemn occasion. When we came as students, Professor Rajaraman had just left the institute, but we learned our Pascal, our Fortran and the numerical methods from his book and that was the backbone of our education. At the time we had a DEC10 here and almost all of the ground floor was filled with this DEC10 memory banks and the CPUs and so on. It was and the lights that were flashing were what we had to see and behind the scenes the computer center which was operational 24x7, the terminals that were operational 24x7 and we spent night outs in the computer center and behind the scenes the computer staff, the DEC10 was running the TOPS10 operating system at the time and if there were problems there was always Professor Rajaraman. This was the word we heard all the time. He was the one who held hands with of the CC staff because when things became bad there was always somebody called Professor Rajaraman.
He is the icon of computing, the father of computing in India. In my opinion, when I look back and he has come to IIT later on and I had the honor of meeting him a few times, he has touched generations of people in the way he has taught. He is definitely a person in my opinion with the grace of God and bestowed with the powers because it is not possible to lead the country from a state where it was pretty ignorant in computing, in computer science and pretty much led the way forward and what is when I remember his, as Professor Biswas was mentioning, when I remember his interactions, it seems he had this vision and clarity in him, where was the nation headed, what he had to do and he sort of was the beacon of light pulling us along, the entire nation and I simply do not see anybody else of that level.
It is a loss for the country and he has been the father of computing and thank you very much.
