The Association of Tamil American Professionals (ATAP)

The Association of Tamil American Professionals (ATAP) is a non-profit organization dedicated to provide our community with the tools and resources for professional growth and development. Our mission is to establish a formal network of Tamil Americans to engage in professional development, emerging opportunities, and social service.
Our community is made up of physicians, engineers, IT specialists, business consultants, entrepreneurs, and more. The collective experience of our community can help guide professionals to prominent educational pathways, career opportunities, and business development across a variety of industries and functions. In addition to aggregating the resources of our community, ATAP will also provide valuable tools which will include, but not limited to:
Speaking engagements, panel discussions, and seminars
Multi-day conferences
Career building/job placement workshops
Database of Tamil American Professionals
White papers and other publications
ATAP wants to create a forum that will stimulate creative thinking, utilize untapped resources, and form new alliances that will lead to business development. Finally, ATAP understands the importance of being involved in our local communities and will provide aid to those that are less fortunate through philanthropic and fund raising activities.
Our team is excited to plan future events and programs, and looks forward to your participation. Please email info@atapnational.org with any questions and join our mailing list to receive information on upcoming events.

http://www.atapnational.org/

Know our people - Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an Indian-American journalist. He is currently assistant managing editor for continuous news at The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Chandrasekaran holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily.

At The Post he has served as bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. In 2004, he was journalist-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

His first book is Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone published in 2006, which won the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and is a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction.

Know our people - Anand Chandrasekaran

A native of India and graduate of Stanford University, Anand has significant marketing and entrepreneurial expertise. He co-founded the Silicon Valley company Aeroprise Inc. in 2001. In 2004, MIT recognized Anand as an innovator and named him to the Global Technovators list of 15 innovators. Anand's entrepreneurial efforts have received coverage in BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, rediff.com and Fortune.

Launched Aeroprise with 6-minute "Superman" demo at DEMOMobile (other products launched in the past include Google, TiVo and the Palmpilot)

Anand's involvement with independent film is somewhat serendipitous - coming from reconnecting with college friend and filmmaker Ray ArtConsidered a pioneer in the convergence of Hollywood and the Internet.

First producer to use a Flash Mob to promote an independent film.hur Wang.

Know our people - Sunkrish Balasubramanian

Sunkrish Bala (born Sunkrish Balasubramanian on May 21, 1984) is an American actor. Bala was born in Bombay, India of Tamil ancestry.He graduated Bellarmine College Preparatory, San Jose in 2002 and from the school of Theater, Film, & Television at UCLA in 2006.Since early 2007, Bala has appeared in a regular role as Eric on ABC's Notes from the Underbelly.

Know our people - Madhu Sudan

Madhu Sudan is an Indian computer scientist, associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Madhu Sudan was born in Madras (Chennai), India. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997.

Madhu Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, and error-correcting codes. His work is characterized by brilliant insights and wide-ranging interests. In mathematics, optimization is the discipline which is concerned with finding the maxima and minima of functions, possibly subject to constraints. ...
He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002.

Know our people - Srinivasa Varadhan

Sathamangalam Ranga Iyengar Srinivasa Varadhan is an Indian-American probabilist.He was born January 2, 1940 in Madras (Chennai), India. He received his undergraduate degree in 1959 from Presidency College, Madras and his doctorate in 1963 from the Indian Statistical Institute under Calyampudi R. Rao, who arranged for Andrey Kolmogorov to be present at Varadhan's thesis defense. Since 1963, he has worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where he is currently (as of 2007) a professor.

Varadhan is known for his work with Daniel W. Stroock on diffusion processes, for which he received the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1996, and for his work on large deviations with Monroe Donsker, for which he was awarded the Abel Prize on March 22, 2007 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Varadhan is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Know our people - Sendhil Ramamurthy

Sendhil Ramamurthy (born May 17, 1974) is an American actor, born in Chicago, Illinois but raised in San Antonio, Texas. He is perhaps best known for the role he plays as Indian geneticist Mohinder Suresh in the NBC drama Heroes.

He was born in the US to Indian Tamil parents, both of whom are physicians. His parents are from Bangalore, India. He has one sister, who is a physician, doing a residency in a combined internal medicine and psychiatry residency program. He and his sister were raised in San Antonio. In San Antonio, he went to Keystone School and graduated from there in 1991. He is the cousin of film director Jay Chandrasekhar. He is married to actress Olga Sosnovska; they have one daughter, Halina.

Ramamurthy attended Tufts University initially as a pre-med major to follow in his parents' footsteps. He was also a member of the Kappa Charge of Theta Delta Chi. He then became interested in acting when he took an "Intro to Acting" class during his junior year as part of his graduation requirement. After participating in several plays — including Our Country's Good, he chose to change career goals. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in history and then attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 1999.

Know our people - Ashok Amirtraj

Ashok Amritraj is Chairman and CEO of Hyde Park Entertainment, a Hollywood producer and a former tennis player. His brothers are also tennis players, Vijay Amritraj and Anand Amritraj. Amritraj has produced over 809 films, including, Jeans and hit hollywood films such as Antitrust, Walking Tall, and Bringing Down the House (film), which starred Steve Martin and Queen Latifah. Among his upcoming movies are projects based on Lee Falk's characters Mandrake the Magician.Ashok Amritraj, found love after marrying Chitra in San Thome cathedral in Madras. He has a daughter Priya and a son Milan.

Know Our People - Padma Lakshmi

Lakshmi`s career began at age 20, when she was discovered by a high-profile modeling agent in Spain while sitting in a cafe.[1] As she has stated, “I was the first Indian model to have a career in Paris, Milan and New York. I’m the first one to admit that I was a novelty.

She was born into a South Indian Tamil Brahmin (Iyer) family in 1970 and raised in India and the United States. Her first name means "lotus" in Sanskrit, as well as "pearl" or "jewel." Parvati is a consort of Shiva. Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth.

Know our people - Ramani Ayer

Ramani Ayer

Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of Executive Committee, Chairman of Hartford Fire, Chairman of Hartford Life Inc and Chief Executive Officer of Hartford Fire, Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.

Know Our People - Arvind Raghunathan

Arvind Raghunathan

Arvind Raghunathan is a Managing Director and Head of Global Arbitrage at Deutsche Bank, where he has worked since 1995. In this capacity, he manages a large part of the bank’s proprietary trading and investments in a variety of financial instruments globally.
He was born in India in 1963 and obtained a degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, in 1984, where he was a National Talent Search scholar. He then moved to the United States and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988.
For the next three years, he was an Assistant Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University and the University of California, Davis, where he did fundamental research on computing. During this time, he was also a consultant for a number of corporations, including IBM, Hewlett Packard and Xerox. In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of the Institute for Combinatorics.
Later that year, Mr. Raghunathan joined Credit Suisse First Boston, where he was involved in all aspects of the Equities business. In 1995, he joined Deutsche Bank, where he was a co-founder of a new department called Equity Arbitrage. His group continued to grow and became one of the most successful units within the bank as well as in the industry. He has been named several times as one of the world’s top traders by industry publications.
Mr. Raghunathan is actively involved in a number of non-profit organizations. He is on the board of The Dalton School, where his daughters attend fifth grade. At the Asia Society, Mr. Raghunathan is on the advisory committee of the India Fund, which has sponsored major art and cultural events in the United States, as well as established a center in Mumbai. He is also actively involved in establishing centers for South Asian studies at several universities in the United States. Furthermore, Mr. Raghunathan has led fundraising for Sankara Nethralaya, a charitable hospital that specializes in vision care in India. He has also raised funds for the Democratic Party.
Mr. Raghunathan is married to Sribala (Bonnie) Subramanian, formerly a journalist with Time magazine. Their ten year old twin daughters, Anjali and Lipika, attend fifth grade at the Dalton School.

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar - Autobiography

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar - The Nobel Prize in Physics 1983

Autobiography

I was born in Lahore (then a part of British India) on the 19th of October 1910, as the first son and the third child of a family of four sons and six daughters. My father, Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, an officer in Government Service in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department, was then in Lahore as the Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways. My mother, Sita (neé Balakrishnan) was a woman of high intellectual attainments (she translated into Tamil, for example, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House), was passionately devoted to her children, and was intensely ambitious for them.My early education, till I was twelve, was at home by my parents and by private tuition. In 1918, my father was transferred to Madras where the family was permanently established at that time.In Madras, I attended the Hindu High School, Triplicane, during the years 1922-25. My university education (1925-30) was at the Presidency College. I took my bachelor's degree, B.Sc. (Hon.), in physics in June 1930. In July of that year, I was awarded a Government of India scholarship for graduate studies in Cambridge, England. In Cambridge, I became a research student under the supervision of Professor R.H. Fowler (who was also responsible for my admission to Trinity College). On the advice of Professor P.A.M. Dirac, I spent the third of my three undergraduate years at the Institut för Teoretisk Fysik in Copenhagen.I took my Ph.D. degree at Cambridge in the summer of 1933. In the following October, I was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933-37. During my Fellowship years at Trinity, I formed lasting friendships with several, including Sir Arthur Eddington and Professor E.A. Milne.While on a short visit to Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), at the invitation of the then Director, Dr. Harlow Shapley, during the winter months (January-March) of 1936, I was offered a position as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago by Dr. Otto Struve and President Robert Maynard Hutchins. I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in January 1937. And I have remained at this University ever since.During my last two years (1928-30) at the Presidency College in Madras, I formed a friendship with Lalitha Doraiswamy, one year my junior. This friendship matured; and we were married (in India) in September 1936 prior to my joining the University of Chicago. In the sharing of our lives during the past forty-seven years, Lalitha's patient understanding, support, and encouragement have been the central facts of my life.After the early preparatory years, my scientific work has followed a certain pattern motivated, principally, by a quest after perspectives. In practise, this quest has consisted in my choosing (after some trials and tribulations) a certain area which appears amenable to cultivation and compatible with my taste, abilities, and temperament. And when after some years of study, I feel that I have accumulated a sufficient body of knowledge and achieved a view of my own, I have the urge to present my point of view, ab initio, in a coherent account with order, form, and structure.There have been seven such periods in my life: stellar structure, including the theory of white dwarfs (1929-1939); stellar dynamics, including the theory of Brownian motion (1938-1943); the theory of radiative transfer, including the theory of stellar atmospheres and the quantum theory of the negative ion of hydrogen and the theory of planetary atmospheres, including the theory of the illumination and the polarization of the sunlit sky (1943-1950); hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability, including the theory of the Rayleigh-Bernard convection (1952-1961); the equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, partly in collaboration with Norman R. Lebovitz (1961-1968); the general theory of relativity and relativistic astrophysics (1962-1971); and the mathematical theory of black holes (1974- 1983). The monographs which resulted from these several periods are:1. An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939, University of Chicago Press; reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., 1967).2a. Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1943, University of Chicago Press; reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., 1960).2b. 'Stochastic Problems in Physics and Astronomy', Reviews of Modern Physics, 15, 1 - 89 (1943); reprinted in Selected Papers on Noise and Stochastic Processes by Nelson Wax, Dover Publications, Inc., 1954.3. Radiative Transfer (1950, Clarendon Press, Oxford; reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., 1960).4. Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (1961, Clarendon Press, Oxford; reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., 1981).5. Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium (1968; Yale University Press).6. The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (1983, Clarendon Press, Oxford).However, the work which appears to be singled out in the citation for the award of the Nobel Prize is included in the following papers:'The highly collapsed configurations of a stellar mass', Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 91, 456-66 (1931).'The maximum mass of ideal white dwarfs', Astrophys. J., 74, 81 - 2 (1931).'The density of white dwarfstars', Phil. Mag., 11, 592 - 96 (1931).'Some remarks on the state of matter in the interior of stars', Z. f. Astrophysik, 5, 321-27 (1932).'The physical state of matter in the interior of stars', Obseroatoy, 57, 93 - 9 (1934)'Stellar configurations with degenerate cores', Observatoy, 57, 373 - 77 (1934).'The highly collapsed configurations of a stellar mass' (second paper), Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 95, 207 - 25 (1935).'Stellar configurations with degenerate cores', Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 95, 226-60 (1935).'Stellar configurations with degenerate cores' (second paper), Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 95, 676 - 93 (1935).'The pressure in the interior of a star', Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 96, 644 - 47 (1936).'On the maximum possible central radiation pressure in a star of a given mass', Observatoy, 59, 47 - 8 (1936).'Dynamical instability of gaseous masses approaching the Schwarzschild limit in general relativity', Phys. Rev. Lett., 12, 114 - 16 (1964); Erratum, Phys. Rev. Lett., 12, 437 - 38 (1964).'The dynamical instability of the white-dwarf configurations approaching the limiting mass' (with Robert F. Tooper), Astrophys. J., 139, 1396 - 98 (1964).'The dynamical instability of gaseous masses approaching the Schwarzschild limit in general relativity', Astrophys. J., 140, 417 - 33 (1964).'Solutions of two problems in the theory of gravitational radiation', Phys. Rev. Lett., 24, 611 - 15 (1970); Erratum, Phys. Rev. Lett., 24, 762 (1970).'The effect of graviational radiation on the secular stability of the Maclaurin spheroid', Astrophys. J., 161, 561 - 69 (1970).
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1983, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1984
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar died on August 21, 1995.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1983

SOURCE : http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/chandrasekhar-autobio.html

know our people - Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi (born October 28, 1955 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) is the chairwoman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, the world's fourth-largest food and beverage company. According to the polls Forbes magazine conducted, Nooyi ranks fifth on the 2007 list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women. Nooyi has been named the #1 Most Powerful Business Woman in the world in 2006 and 2007 by Fortune magazine

Know our people - Jay Chandrasekhar

Jayanth Jambulingam Chandrasekhar (born April 9, 1968) is an American actor, comedian, writer, and film director with the comedy team Broken Lizard.

Chandrasekhar was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of physicians, who both have Tamil Indian heritage originating from Tamil Nadu.He attended high school at Lake Forest Academy. He graduated from Colgate University, where he was a part of the comedy troupe Charred Goosebeak with the other Lizards and a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.Chandrasekhar is best known for directing the film version of The Dukes of Hazzard, as well as the troupe's own films, Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest. He also starred as the cab driver in the "Terror Taxi" skit from Jackass: Number Two.

Know our people - Sanjay Raman

Sanjay Raman, Co-Founder & Vice President of Product Development http://www.howcast.com/
Prior to co-founding Howcast, Sanjay worked at Google as a Product Manager for Google Apps, driving product vision for Google's suite of communication and collaboration products. As one of the initial members of the Google Video Team, Sanjay helped launch the first user-generated video upload platform. Earlier in his career, Sanjay spent two years at Morgan Stanley as an analyst. While earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at MIT, Sanjay co-founded and served as chief architect of an enterprise wireless software company that was acquired in 2001.

Know our people - Subrah S. Iyar

Subrah S. Iyar is a co-founder of WebEx Communications Inc. and has been the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer since January 1997 and President since May 12, 2006. Prior to founding WebEx, Mr. Iyar served as Vice President and General Manager of the Northern California Internet Business division of Quarterdeck Corporation, a software company, from October 1995 to November 1996. From 1983 to 1995, Mr. Iyar held several senior positions in Business Development, Marketing ... and Sales management at Apple Computer, Inc., a computer hardware company, Teleos Research and Intel Corporation, a semiconductor company. Mr. Iyar holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Google Transliteration service for Tamil

Currently Google has given Transliteration service for Tamil (Not Translation), Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam. It supposes to be another mile stone in Google and Tamil collaboration. Advantage of this facility is, this small program suggests spellings!!Hope soon google will integrate it with Gmail and other google services. Already google has given Tamil interface for Orkut and soon with other google services such as gmail, gtalk, blogger etc.

McCain Scores Support From Conservative Tamil-Americans

- Republican candidates Senator John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin have gained another support group in their campaign for the White House. The group, Conservative Tamils for McCain, has announced their support of the McCain-Palin ticket. The group appended the following statement, which describes their hopes for a McCain presidency.

The statement reads:

We Conservative Tamil Americans hope that when John McCain becomes president of the U.S. next January, he will be sympathetic to our concerns. Specifically, we are distressed by the continuing slow genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. We think that he will be as concerned as we are about the destruction of the Tamil people and their culture in Sri Lanka.

We support Senator McCain in his pursuit of the presidency because we agree with him that the Sri Lankan civil war will be a continuing 'headache' for the U.S. as this war continues. We hope that President McCain will use the influence of the U.S. to achieve a political settlement that will end the civil war and allow all Sri Lankans to live in peace on their island

We urge the 44th president of the Unite States, Mr. McCain, to send an envoy like former senator George Mitchell (as in Ireland and the Middle East) to talk to both parties in Sri Lanka and draw a road map to peace in Sri Lanka. The road map can be drawn from the successful models of Montenegro, Bosnia, East Timor, Quebec, Slovakia, and Kosovo.

Successive Sri Lankan governments have done nothing to resolve this vicious civil war for more than sixty years, and we believe that they will do nothing to resolve it unless they are forced to do so.

Tamils are weary of waiting for a reasonable devolution from Colombo. German Ambassador to Sri Lanka Jurgen Weerth in August 2008 said that he has also given up hope of finding any solution for Tamils that involved the Colombo government. Germany, he said, did not believe in allowing the majority community to rule over minorities. 'A country should have a give-and-take policy when ruling. Each community should be given preference, instead of supporting one community,' he said.

Weerth further said that Sri Lanka should establish the rule of law, and eliminate human rights violations in the country. He said that while Sri Lanka has a good constitution, the government ignores it.

An outgoing British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, Dominic Chilcott, gave a speech on the Sri Lankan national question, in which he referred to other matters like 'the lack of good governance, transparency, law and order, and the presence of institutional racism, racist stereotyping, demonizing of the UN agencies, discrimination, sense of impunity,' etc. He also drove home the blatant truth about the deplorable condition of the veritable jungle of corruption, nepotism, dire human rights violations, conflicts of interest, and hypocrisy that Sri Lanka is.

Besides George Mitchell, there are many more potential peace envoys or mediators we can find in the U.S., including Bill Clinton, James Baker, Richard Holbrooke, Jim Leach, Colin Powell, and certainly many others.

In 2002, Mr. Richard Armitage and some other Republican officials helped to arrange what was later called 'the Norwegian backed cease-fire.' We expect that these experienced diplomats will be active in the McCain administration.

We Tamils know that we urgently need help from a strong and kind friend. We hope that the U.S. under President McCain will be that friend.

We know that Senator McCain expressed his sympathy for the oppressed Tamil minority in Sri Lanka during an interview with Larry King when Bill Clinton was president. We are confident that he will remember those sentiments and make them into policy when he is president.

When Mr. McCain is president we expect that he will use his own judgment as to how this goal, the goal of peace in Sri Lanka, can best be achieved.

We Conservative Tamils are looking forward to the day when President McCain and his advisers get to work resolving so many of the world's problems, and we trust that this problem will be among them. We offer Mr. McCain our enthusiastic support and look forward to seeing his foreign policy evolve when he is president.

We emphasize that stability in Sri Lanka will give all peoples living there a better chance to improve their lives in a stable island.

To contact the group, email any communication to info(at)ConservativeTamilsForMcCain.com
Visit their website at www. ConservativeTamilsForMcCain.com

Conservative Tamils for McCain - 2008


Media Contact:
Conservative Tamils For McCain
Conservative Tamils For McCain
(415) 830 8524

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