(2006-02-19) BR Natarajan
One sees great things from the valley while others see small things from the peak and these awards are the highest recognition by the BITS Pilani community to thirty students or alums for their extraordinary achievements before the age of 30.
2005 is the first year these awards are being presented and those chosen to receive these awards have been selected by six highly accomplished members of the BITS Alumini Association community - Mr Dilip D'Souza writer and columnist, Dr Satish Gupta Founder Cradle Technologies and Chairman BPO Frontline; Mr Rajesh Hukku Chairman I-Flex Solutions; Dr SP Kothari Head of Economics Accounting & Finance Department MIT Sloan; Prof LK Maheshwari Director and Pro Vice Chancellor BITS Pilani; Prof AP Mathur Professor of Computer Science Purdue University.
Ishan Shukla is the youngest to win under the Professional Excellence category for being the runner up in the Microsoft Imagine cup 2005 competition when all odds were going against him.
Kavikrut got the award under the Entrepreneurship category for the Mobile Medics idea to bring health care to rural India for one rupee a day.
Durga Mitra Prabhu who has been selected to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games stole the award under sports category.
Under the Innovation category, Jagadeesh Krishnan for designing the first switch mode audio power amplifier in deep sub-micron technology; Sreekhar Cheboyina for the novel method of making pellets for drugs; Shivakumar Swaminathan for his work on IBM's PowerPC based chips walked away with the awards.
Divya Kanika the actress in various Tamil, Telugu and Kannada films; Rahul Gopal the founder and drummer of Rock band No Idea; Kranthi Kiran Tumma the Math wizard and Mahesh Ramasubramanian who works for Dreamworks Studios Los Angeles and was a core member of the Oscar winning team for Shrek took the awards under the Arts & Culture Category.
Under the Academia & Research category, Shilpa Sambashivan UCLA (Amyloid Research); Garima Kochhar Dell (HPCC Servers); Manik Reddy Pullagurla University of Georgia( Research in Genetics); Kartik Hosanagar currently Associate Professor Wharton School; Ranjani Vardan University of Maryland College Park (Protein Chemistry Research); Amol Bakshi University of Southern California (Parallel and Distributed Computing Research) and Girish Venkataramani Carnegie Mellon University (Nanoscale Computing Research) were given the awards.
Amit Thakral founder trustee of Sparsh; Krishna Hegde presently student at Dartmouth and who worked for a whole gamut of community projects; Minakshi Krishnan presently student at Wharton and who worked tirelessly on a range of projects for a number of charities in USA and India; Sridhar Nagarajan Fundraiser Coordinator for AID San Francisco and Sriram Kumar who runs marathon for causes got the awards for Community Leadership.
The All Round Leadership category awards went to Aditi Pany (TARAhaat); Srikrishna Sridhar Murthy the first employee outside Dell USA to be recognized by Dell Foundation as a "Volunteer of Distinction"; Suhail Kassim currently officer at Tata Administrative Services; Shameek Chakravarty currently at ISB as the Asian Mentoring Chair of the Global Social Venture Competition; Prasanna V Krishnan currently student at Wharton School and who was named by Microsoft as one of the 15 Fast Track employees with potential to be future company leaders; VT Bharadwaj currently with McKinsey & Co; Nikhil Kumar Srivastava who designed the world's fastest gallium arsenide semiconductor circuit with a switching time of 2.08 pico seconds and Swati Satpathy currently with Unilever Netherlands.
This award is dedicated to all those young BITSians who thought and acted differently, who challenged the status quo, rewrote the rules and created their own paths. To the leaders, innovators, researchers, academicians, students, entertainers, entrepreneurs, winners, runners, engineers, scientists and good samaritans who came from every corner to be the best examples of what it means to be a BITSian.
Everything in lives happens for a purpose and that purpose is to prepare us and for these young achievers, their alma mater BITS Pilani takes pride in having prepared them.
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Birla Institute of Technology and Science
Pilani (Rajasthan) India 333 031
Anupendra Sharma