Kesav Vithal Nori joined
the Computer Group, TIFR, in 1970. He had studied for his B. Tech. at IIT, Bombay and for his master's at IIT Kanpur. He had then
worked there for a couple of years after his M. Tech. He was one of the first
Indians to get deeply interested in Structured Programming and in developments
in programming languages. He was a pioneer in compiler technology. At
TIFR, Kesav did research and taught. He rose to be a Research Scientist.
I was deeply involved with
initiating and running part-time courses in software technology from the
seventies. Kesav was a great partner in this effort. From TIFR, he went back to
IIT Kanpur as he always enjoyed teaching. He was a very friendly person,
generous to a fault for sharing knowledge.
He had worked with Nicklaus
Wirth, one of the world’s leading computer scientists. Kesav had spent some
time at the Technische Hochschule in Zurich and had contributed to the work on
a Pascal Compiler, P2. He also spent some time as Visiting Faculty at
the Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
He was an academic who
interacted with colleagues in software companies with ease. At a time when the
software industry in India was seeing unprecedented growth, he joined Tata
Consultancy Services. He worked with the Tata Research Development and Design
Centre (TRDDC) and rose to be executive Director and executive Vice President
of TCS. Kesav shared with Dr FC Kohli a deep commitment to adult education. Kesav’s
contributions to the Computer Society of India (CSI) are well-known. CSI
honored him with a Fellowship in 2010.
An interesting titbit was
mentioned to me by Prof V Rajaraman after he reviewed this article. While at
TCS, Kesav had fashioned tools for scanning thousands of pages of code to
identify places where Y2K problems lurked. This vastly speeded up the work of
TCS teams working on client software.
After retiring from TCS,
Kesav worked with educational institutions, and in particular, with International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. His interests
here were mainly in software engineering and in Technology for Education.
Kesav was a great teacher,
colleague, and a great human being.
Srinivasan Ramani
