Chandroth Vasudevan Radhakrishnan (ചന്ദ്രോത്ത് വാസുദേവൻ രാധാകൃഷ്ണൻ) aka CV Radhakrishnan aka CVR (born 20 January 1953), is an Indian free software developer, entrepreneur and the Founder of River Valley Technologies.
He is also one of the founding members of
TeX
Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
Users Group in India.
[Sebastian Rahtz]
Inaugural meeting of TUGIndia
– TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 1 (PDF).
Early life
The eldest of four children, CV Radhakrishnan was born on 20 January 1953 in the village of
Kuzhithurai
Kuzhithurai (also called as "Kullhithurai") is a town and a municipality in Kanyakumari District in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is the administrative headquarters of the Vilavancode Taluk.
It is located north of the Nagercoil city an ...
in
Kanyakumari district,
now part of the state of
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is the southernmost States and union territories of India, state of India. The List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of Indi ...
, India.
Career
Radhakrishnan started his career at the Indian Telecom department where he worked briefly for six months in 1973. From there, he moved to Delhi
and joined the Ministry of Shipping and Transport.
While working in Delhi, he experienced a weakness in his leg muscles and was diagnosed with a neurological disorder known as peroneal
muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophies (MD) are a genetically and clinically heterogeneous group of rare neuromuscular diseases that cause progressive weakness and breakdown of skeletal muscles over time. The disorders differ as to which muscles are primarily affe ...
.
Informed by the doctors that he could not expect to live beyond five years,
he quit his job and returned to Kerala to stay with his parents.
In Kerala, he joined the administrative department of
Kerala University
University of Kerala (formerly known as University of Travancore) is a state-run public university in Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital of Kerala, India. It was established in 1937 by a promulgation of the Maharajah of Travancore, Chithira ...
.
He continued there for the next fifteen years until he quit in 1993 to set up River Valley Technologies.
TeX and free software
CV Radhakrishnan began to learn about computers during his stint at Kerala University.
Having no formal training in them, he took it up as a way to distract himself from his disease.
During this time, his job at the university got him acquainted with Prof.
K. S. S. Nambooripad
K, or k, is the eleventh letter of the English alphabet.
K may also refer to:
General uses
* K, a normal modal logic
* K (programming language), an array processing language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems
* K ( ...
of the Department of Mathematics.
The professor, an ardent TeX lover, introduced Radhakrishnan to the TeX language.
Radhakrishnan soon started exploring the possibilities of the TeX language.
Beginning with research papers of the university students, he went on to apply TeX in typesetting Entomon,
an entomology research journal of the Department of Zoology. In 1994, he set up River Valley Technologies as a proprietary firm offering typesetting services.
Radhakrishnan's involvement with the Free Software movement started with the inauguration of the Indian TeX Users Group at Trivandrum in January 1998.
[Sebastian Rahtz]
Inaugural meeting of TUGIndia
– TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 1 (PDF). He was nominated as the secretary of the Indian TeX users group during the meeting.
[Sebastian Rahtz]
Inaugural meeting of TUGIndia
– TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 1 (PDF). Around this time, FreeDevelopers.Net, a commercial company based in Washington was incorporated.
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
was its Chief Ethical Officer.
The prime aim of FreeDevelopers. Net was to function as a democratic entity that stood for the development of free software. Radhakrishnan founded the Indian chapter of
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
on 20 July 2001.
[V. Sasi Kumar]
"The Origins of FSF India"
''Linux For You'', December 2007, pp. 34–35. Radhakrishan maintains a number of LaTeX packages in
CTAN
C mathematical operations are a group of functions in the C standard library, standard library of the C programming language implementing basic mathematical functions. Different C standards provide different, albeit backwards-compatible, sets of ...
.
[LaTeX packages maintained at CTA]
River Valley Technologies
River Valley Technologies came into existence on the premises of the Software Technology Park (STP)
in Trivandrum on 1 January 1994. Started as a proprietary concern dealing with software and IT enabled services and registered under the STP system, the firm soon began providing typesetting services to major publishing houses. In 2003, River Valley Technologies contributed to the timely publication of
BSNL
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (commonly known as BSNL) () is an Indian central public sector undertaking, under the ownership of Department of Telecommunications, which is part of the Ministry of Communications, Government of India with its he ...
's telephone directory.
Later, Radhakrishnan registered a new private limited company that came to be known as STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd (STMDocs).
Working completely on free software, STMDocs is one of the main suppliers of Elsevier and has also provided typesetting services to Nature, Institute of Physics & Cambridge University Press.
Sprawled across a green stretch of four acres, the main campus of the company is located at Malayinkeezhu,
a village located 15 km from the city of Thiruvananthapuram. Radhakrishnan has designed the campus to be an eco sanctuary that houses a range of bio-diverse species from exotic trees to birds and bees. Running on renewable energy and rain water harvesting and actively practising organic farming, the company won the Special Jury award for Biodiversity from the Kerala State Biodiversity Board in 2019.
[Biodiversity Awards](_blank)
/ref>
Philanthropy
Radhakrishnan supports philanthropic efforts through non-profit projects spearheaded by the Sayahna Foundation, a virtual community set up by him to promote open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...
publishing and collaborative digitisation of all contents that enrich humanity, culture, heritage and history.
Personal life
Radhakrishnan is married
References
External links
River Valley Technologies
Sayahna Foundation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Radhakrishnan, Chandroth Vasudevan
1953 births
Living people
Free software programmers
Indian typographers and type designers
Indian computer programmers