Young Achievers

By Our Special Correspondent

A Born in Chennai, the man who gave the rupee its symbol-using a classic mix of the Devanagiri and the English script-Udaya Kumar’s design for the symbol was chosen from several hundred entries. A 32year old PhD in Tamil typography and a professor in IIT Guwahati, Udaya Kumar has also designed a Tamil font named “Parashakti” as a mini project at the Industrial Design Centre, IDC. During his MDes project, he wrote and designed a book on Tamil typography, which is the first attempt at bringing a topic like typography to a Tamil audience. In this book, Kumar also created new Tamil terminology for many

D. UDAY KUMAR

The Rupee Man

For Krushnaa Patil’s family, vacations were always about travelling to the Himalayas. It was this love for the mountains that saw this Maharastra-born 19 years old gaining admission at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) at Uttarkashi for a basic course in 2007, followed by an advance course in 2008. At the age of 19, Krushnaa Patil conquered new heights becoming the youngest woman in India to climb the Mount Everest in 2009. And now, she is on a 7-Summit Quest, attempting to climb the tallest peak in every continent around the world.

KRUSHNAA PATIL

The Himalayan Girl

The Guwahati-born, Bangalore-based tech researcher Indrani Medhi developed a design process to expand the impact of technology for all those who can’t read. 32 years old Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) that allow any first-time illiterate person, on first contact with a computer, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. The software engineer at Microsoft Research India’s Bangalore lab is now creating a design to bring in text free interfaces that will be a breakthrough technology that takes the digital world closer to the illiterate,

INDRANI MEDHI

The Young Tech