Prashant Vithani

Namaste, Ma'am...Aapko 1 story sunata hoon.... In the summer of 1980, a distraught 7th grade boy stood in the courtyard of a modest house in Mylapore, watching his father toss his cricket bat down a deep well. A fast bouncer had shattered the boy's spectacles during a local match & his father, a renowned Sanskrit logician, was terrified for his son's sight. "Your cricket days are done," his father declared, handing him a violin. "If you want to master precision, master this." The boy did not throw a tantrum. He directed his focus toward the strings, training until he was performing alongside musical legends, even taking direct corrections from Bharat Ratna M.S. Subbulakshmi. 5 yrs later, he suffered another blow: he failed to clear the IIT-JEE examination. He did not give up. He enrolled in a regional engineering college, quietly mastering computer science logic gates. He eventually worked his way into IIT Madras as a postgrad researcher, earned a PhD, joined as a prof & eventually became the Director of the very institute that had once turned him away. By 2011, while the world was building consumer mobile apps, this prof was looking at a hidden national vulnerability: every radar, fighter jet, banking server & defense system in India was running on foreign-designed microprocessors. He had a single question in his mind: "We can test that a foreign chip does what we WANT it to do. But can we guarantee it does not do something we DO NOT want it to do when a war starts?" He proposed building a completely indigenous, industrial-grade microprocessor from scratch. Global tech giants insisted it could not be done w/o billions of dollars in infrastructure & massive foreign patents. He did not care. Working out of cramped labs on long shifts, he & his team adopted the open source RISC-V instruction set. They hand-coded logic gates, mapped silicon layouts & verified billions of instruction cycles. In July 2018, a tiny 16mm² piece of silicon codenamed Risecreek arrived back at the lab. The team wired it up, flipped the switch & watched a flickering monitor as the Linux operating system booted on 100% Indian-designed silicon for the 1st time in history. Today, his SHAKTI processor architecture powers everything from defense communications to space grade controllers built in collaboration with ISRO. That young boy whose father threw his cricket bat down a well... The student who missed the JEE list in 1985... The violinist who turned down the official IIT Director's mansion to stay in his family home & protect his late father's Sanskrit library... His name is Prof. Veezhinathan Kamakoti.