- Lived:
- born 2 July 1958, Kothavadi, a farming village near Pollachi, Coimbatore district, Tamil Nadu → the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore (Bengaluru), where India's spacecraft are built; living, as of September 2026
- Field:
- spacecraft engineering — project director of Chandrayaan-1, India's first mission to the Moon, and a career spanning the INSAT communication satellites, the Mars Orbiter Mission and the directorship of the satellite centre itself
- The Big Idea:
- A mission run on a famously small budget by a farmer's son who once could not follow an English lecture put India's flag on the Moon and carried the instruments that found water there — and the discovery belongs to a team, which is exactly the point.
- In their words:
- Kaiyaruke Nila — roughly, "the Moon, within hand's reach" — the title he gave his own Tamil account of the mission (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- India remembers ISRO; it does not remember its engineers. This chapter names one — not because he did it alone, but because somebody conducted the orchestra, and the conductor grew up walking to a Tamil-medium village school.