’Padma Shri’ : Two from Mangaluru among year 2017 awardees

’Padma Shri’ : Two from Mangaluru among year 2017 awardees

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, Jan 28, 2017: The government Padma Shri awards 2017, have  two from Mangaluru, and were quite famous in their chosen fields. The two are :

 

Anant Agarwa :

A recipients of Padma Shri award, Anant Agarwal, a Mangalurean, is the president of edX, a world-wide online learning initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. The online learning initiative has been named among the 15 classroom revolutionaries by Forbes agazine. He taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 1.55 lakh students from 162 countries. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM.

Agarwal did his early education in St Aloysius College from class 1 to PUC (1977). He holds a PhD from Stanford and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and led the development of Raw-an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle-an early multithreaded microprocessor and Alewife-a scalable multiprocessor.

Chamu Krishna Shastry :

Another recipient Chamu Krishna Shastry, co-founder of the Samskrita Bharati movement, who aims to popularise Sanskrit as a spoken language across the world, was also born in Kedila village of Bantwal taluk in Dakshina Kannada.

Through 10-day Sanskrit camps of Samskrita Bharati, thousands of people have been learning Sanskrit. "Padma Shri honour is an award to the Samskrita Bharathi and its dedicated volunteers across India. I am only a representative of Samskrita Bharati," he said. He studied Sanskrit at Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, Tirupati.

He was also a member of the Union government-constituted Sanskrit Committee that developed the ’Road Map for the Development of Sanskrit-Ten-Year Perspective Plan’ document in 2016.