Gratitude to the IIT Madras faculty.

Thank you for leading IIT Madras with a builder's energy, from indigenous processor work to a campus culture that ships real technology for India.

Thank you for carrying IIT Madras across the ocean as founding leader of its Zanzibar campus, and for modelling combustion and emissions with rigour and joy.

Thank you for ultrasonics and inspection robots that quietly keep pipes and plants safe, and for now nurturing IIT Madras Zanzibar's young campus.

Thank you for turning nanoscale chemistry into clean drinking water for tens of millions of people, and for showing that curiosity about a single cluster of atoms can serve a whole country.

Thank you for building India's reinforcement learning community from Chennai, and for leading data science research that keeps humans and Indian realities at the centre.

Thank you for mapping the metabolism of microbes with mathematics, and for teaching computational biology with a clarity that has pulled thousands into the field.

Thank you for the physics of sprays and droplets done beautifully, and for connecting alumni, startups, and students into one generous IIT Madras family.

Thank you for scholarship that connects climate, energy, and the ethics of public life, and for keeping the humanities a first-class citizen at an engineering school.

Thank you for logic and linear algebra taught with uncommon patience, and for textbooks that quietly carry IIT Madras mathematics into classrooms everywhere.

Thank you for corDECT, the Research Park, and forty years of insisting that Indian technology must be affordable to be meaningful.

Thank you for NPTEL, the brainchild that opened IIT lectures to every student in India, and for a decade of directorship that made IIT Madras more open and more humane.