Saturday, July 9, 2011

Prof. G. S. Sanyal Passes Away

If you try to find biography of a person in any search engine and come across hundreds of other biographies that bears his name, you are looking for a person who has grown beyond himself. Such a person can never pass away and that proves how inaccurate the title of this post is. The DNA is carried by thousands of people and it is only the mortal frame that bade adieu.

It was 7th July, 2011 afternoon. The NSS Advisory Committee Meeting was just concluded. I was leaving Board Room after some last minute discussion with Program Adviser of NSS Regional HQ. "Prof. Sanyal is no more", said the Director. We rushed to Prof. Sanyal's quarter. It was at about 5 P.M. Gradually, faculty members, staffs - the IIT community started pouring in. We started informing outstation faculty members. They started calling back to know when the last rites would be performed and how they can be at Kharagpur at that time.

The last time I heard Prof. Sanyal speaking and speaking emphatically was 14th June, 2011. It was Research Scholars' Day at GS Sanyal School of Telecommunication. I have added pic of that here (Top two). He discussed fundamentals of communication for about 10 minutes at a stretch. You can see the rapt attention and reverence in the audience that includes Deputy Director, Dean of Post Graduate Studies, Chairman of the School, Faculty Members. It wasn't only for young research scholars, it was an educative experience of all present. I wish, I had recorded it.

He was Director when I joined as a B.Tech. student here in 1986. I had few interactions with him in recent times where he talked about his one dream project. He wanted to capture electromagnetic radiation coming out of human body and use it for diagnostic purpose. I said that it would be great to participate and take care of the signal processing and pattern recognition part of the proposed diagnostic tool. I understand that he regularly sat across the table with faculty members from electromagnetic / microwave background to gather a signal of decent signal-to-noise ratio. He interacted with one of them on this the previous Friday i.e. the 1st July, 2011.

I have added one pic (the 3rd one) of Prof. GS Sanyal from ICCCD-2010 (he is the 2nd person in front row). This was taken on 10th Dec., 2010 while Ex-President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam was addressing the audience. The last pic was taken yesterday when his mortal frame visited the Dept. for the last time.

Request readers to visit these links (Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4) to know more about the man and the legacy he has left behind. (Pls. click at various links at bottom of the webpage of Link2)

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