Hi, I am Rickesh T.N. For the
curious among you my full name is Rickesh Thandalai Natarajan (and NOT Rickesh
Tamil Nadu). The derivation of the name can be mapped to Rigveda (seriously, I
have no clue beyond that). Being born in Secunderabad and brought up in 6
different places – Jammu, Pune, Vishakhapatnam, Chennai, Bangalore and a short
stint (of 4 years) at Mangalore. But I prefer to associate myself with
Bangalore more than with any other place.
Obviously, my schooling was in
more than one school – Kendirya Vidyalayas at Southern Command, Pune; Naval Armament
Depot, Vishakhapatnam; Heavy Vehicles Factory,
Chennai; National Aerospace Laboratories,
Bangalore. Thanks to Indian Army that I was able to study all over India and this
exposed me to varied cultures.
During my schooling I was known
for being the naughtiest and most talkative pupil in the class. This meant my
parents had to show their prompt presence in all Parents-Teachers Meeting,
something that the parents of other kids did not have to worry about. It became
more or less a practice by majority of teachers to make me sit in front desk –
right below their nose. But the talking
never stopped! My most hated subjects were languages. I still remember my English
teacher beat me up for scoring a centum in Math and a mere 60 in English. This continued
through till the 10+2. I have never ever scored above 75% in any of the
languages.
Another incident from school which always cracks me up goes
as follows:
In 9th standard, as
usual I am on the first bench and we are in the Science class. My friend
(sitting next to me) comments “The water (H2O)
in that reaction that teacher wrote on the black board, is it pure water or dirty
water?” Naturally, I burst out laughing. The teacher caught us both and
asked what it was about? I explained and, next minute, we were out of the class!
Getting to the college part, I
pursued my graduation at NITK, Surathkal, Mangalore. I was one of the few
students who had come from a Biology background and taken up Information
Technology. I had no clue what C
programming was and what those stdio.h, stdlib.h, etc. were. In the very first
C programming lab of first year I literally had no idea what a bubble sort or a
palindrome was. Thanks to the few
buddies in class somehow they taught me how to code and clear through the first
year. From the second year onwards things seemed to get better because of a good
friend circle. I still recall all those hostel enjoyments, birthday parties, senior-junior
interactions, hostel corridor cricket, corridor Diwali, launching Diwali rockets
into the blocks of seniors, Holi celebrations, and many more activities. Apart
from these activities, our 3-4 months holiday span enabled me to crack into two
summer projects during the 2nd and 3rd year holidays. Thanks to those projects and the professors,
it was a great learning and introduced me to the inter-disciplinary domain of
computer vision.
During the final year I got
placed in Tektronix through campus placements. In July I complete 2 years in
Tektronix and all this time I have been part of the Cerify team in the Video
Product Line. My major work has been in algorithms for baseband video checks. I
learnt a lot in the last two years at Tek.
My hobbies are writing blogs, travelling
to remote places, teaching, adventurous sports (parasailing/gliding, flying a
two-seater plane) and trekking. The highest priority in my ‘bucket list’ is sky
diving and scuba diving. I hope to strike out one of the two this year. In
addition, I am a Facebook hater, Twitter and Quora lover.
