Navin drowned three years ago today  / Neil Baker (coworker)

Three years ago today on augustus 4 2006 Navin drowned in a Cornell University waterfall drowning pool. Yes Cornell actually has a waterfall on its campus.

Navin had just earned his PhD at UCSB and had traveled to Cornell for a conference. He and some friends chose to cool off at the waterfall. Navin drowned.

The fact that a Cornell student drowned at the same spot only two years later last summer attests that Cornell administrators are probably as criminally negligent and unaccountable as UCSB mafia's Yang and gang.

Having been unjustly fired from UCSB two years earlier I had not immediately heard about Navin's drowning but I have thought about him since a little bit almost every day.

His death spooked me. When I first viewed the UCSB memorial website to Navin I saw that they used a photo of him that I had taken when Navin was visiting the nanofab cleanroom where I worked.

It is more accurate to say that I was further spooked by Navin because I had already been amply spooked by UCSB after Jennifer San Marco massacred her former coworkers at the USPS facility a near stones throw away from UCSB just at the same time I'd been contemplating the complete destruction of the UCSB plantation. There were a near infinite number of places it could have happened but it happened in Goleta. Bizarre.

My former UCSB faculty supervisor Mark Rodwell who exhibited the most loathsome cowardice and deceit when terminating me had also recently suffered a coincidental crippling injury that I found spooky because of its odd righteous justice.

Additionally Navin's death spooked me because of my memory of his disgraceful service to his advisor Mark Rodwell who had dishonestly propagandized against me to Navin and other grad students in a sick attempt to win support for his imminent shameful termination of me.

I was in serious conflict with Rodwell because of his incompetence and refusal to perform the unpleasant and difficult tasks that his supervisor title required him to perform. He was exempting from discipline and coddling an extremely hostile brain-damaged employee. He was also turning a blind eye to gross criminal mismanagement of the facility he supervised. To escape his responsibility Rodwell fired me instead and lobbied his slave grad students for support.

It was the Friday before the Monday I was fired and I was backing an electric vehicle up to the door of the nanofab cleanroom to load some copper bars for transport to the machine shop across campus. As I backed up I used the rearview mirror to guide my way. As I did the reflection of Navin suddenly appeared directing intense visual daggers of hate at me.

I can still recall thinking how strange it was. Except for one time when I scolded Navin for having dropped a second potentially incendiary 2.5 liter glass bottle of flammable acetone on the floor of the cleanroom I had never been in conflict with Navin. I received another Navin shot of visual hatred through the mirror as I pulled away. He had been swayed into his wretched condition of anger toward me due to his slavish devotion to his unworthy and despicable advisor Rodwell who along with other cowardly faculty had propagandized against me.

Unfortunately casting a malicious malevolence via a mirror was boomerang lethal to Navin.

It is interesting to wonder what Navin would be doing today were he still alive but sadly I think it is a safe bet that he would be pursuing the same rampant mediocrity as his colleagues choked and stifled by the self-imposed phony elitism of the worthless PhD title.

UCSB is a wicked cursed and corrupted place. Tragically Navin was seduced and used by its worst elements.

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Junior at SMA  / Haritha E. (Junior at SMA )

I was Navin's junior in St. Michael's and thought there was something of a spark about him that I adored.

I always wished to be able to talk to him. Or get noticed by him.

This is extremely sad and my love to his family.

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memories of pattani  / Joe Xavier (friend from michael's )

i've known pattani for as long as i can remember. from school through tuitions to silly, stupid wild escapades. from school excursions to thinking of applying to grad school. my last memory of navin was hanging out with him in sf. we walked about the waterfront and talked about a bunch of stuff, from the girls we'd both crushed on to the nobel winning physicist in his department. something about the guy never changed through the time i knew him - a weird kind of innocence, a belief that the world was inherently good.

you'll be missed pattani. sleep tight.

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friend / Venkat Kalyanaraman (friend)
Dear Navin,
I just thought about you now and felt like visiting your site. I still strongly believe that you are with me. I was just thinking of those days when I used to come to your house during our BITS semester holidays. I cant forget those lovely times we spent making fun of each other while roaming around in Chennai. Certainly I have lost several of my most cherished memories!
I miss you! Close

being ragged by navin...  / Radhakrishnan K. Srinivasan (junior in bits )
This is Kuku, one batch junior to Navin in bits. these guys were right on the top of our wing and were among the first ones to rag us. I remember Navin, Kuma, and others during ragging..... 
i remember navin melting candle wax on my hands on the last day of ragging before the welcome party for freshers:-). Trust me, it was actually funny and not so scary as it sounds!  He always does these wild things in a whacky way.  I also remember Navin taking me to a movie during freshers period, when freshers are not "allowed" for RAF movies.
I remember Navin and katraman very well and its sad that both of them have passed away....

a very nice chap, very social, helped us quite a bit during the first year.
 
was very upset to see this news...god bless his soul and may he be remembered by one and all for his positive nature and smiling face. 


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... / Manikandan Balasubramanian (Friend and Batchmate )
It is indeed saddening to have lost Navin.. Would always remember him for the cricket we played together, the music we discussed and the most impressive of all.. the SMILE he wore all the time... Close

He has not left  / Deeptha Echampati (Sister's Friend )
I am deeply shocked to hear of Navin's sad demise. I was his sister's classmate in St.Michael's, a very close friend of Sri Ranjani, and I look upto Navin for his academic excellence & good heart. Though I have not interacted much with him, I have come to respect him through his family. My heart felt condolences go out to his family. I pray his soul should rest in peace - Deeptha Close

I feel shattered!  / Veena E.Gayathri (Family Friend )
I have known his sister Sriranjani closely as a student of St.Michael's and as my daughter's classmate.I have heard about Navin and as I always felt Sriranjani and my daughter were more like sisters,I developed a lot of love and affection for her and knew her to be a very intelligent,well-behaved and affectionate child.Naturally any mention of her brother Navin only endeared him to me, even if I had never met him.All the good and lovable qualities which I found in Sriranjani were expected to be in Navin too and I always wanted to see him.
           His father,Sri Parthasarathy is extremely well known in the field of carnatic music as one of the key organisers of Maruthi Bhaktha Samajam,the highly acclaimed cultural wing of the famous Nanganallur Sri Anjaneya Temple.During the Chennai Music Season the temple would organise concerts and as one of the performers I would meet Sri Parthasarathy and his family in the temple premises during the December Festival.During such visits,I came to know that Navin had great interest in music,especially carnatic.
          When I had called up their residence on August 4th to invite them for my daughter's wedding,not even in my wildest dreams did I imagine that Sri.Parthasarthy was flying to the US on the same day to collect the body of his beloved child.I tried several times just to get their residential address,just to invite them for the wedding of my daughter and I did not get a response.I had to post the card to the temple address.It was on December 21st, in the greenroom of Kalarasana(during my music festival concert) that I came to know of Navin's demise and was shocked to the core.The ghatam vidwan,Sri.Trichy Murali ,myself and Trichur Narendran were tuning our instruments when I enquired about Sri.Parthasarathy and his family and Trichy Murali blurted the news to me.He also added that since there was a marriage in my family and that too my daughter's,Sri.Parthasarathy did not want to communicate the terrible news to me.I do not believe in orthodox formalities and dos and don'ts( "should not inform news about death at the time of marriage" of whoever it may be) especially when it is the case of such an untimely and painfully premature death of the child,Navin.
                All I can say is that myself and my entire family  are at a loss for words,such is the depth of sadness we are feeling.If my words can console anyone,there is no death for the soul,Navin has only shed his body and will surely stay united with his beloved parents,sister,and all his wonderful friends who have all contributed in making his visit to this planet a joyful and memorable one.Karma is so strong and profound that he will once again be united with all his near and dear ones in someway or the other.
               My heart felt condolences to one and all,and to you,my dearest Sriranjani.
              E.Gayathri Close

unforgettable / Sridhar Gopalakrishnan (friend)
i know him very little. For his smile and pleasant manners, i would remember him always.  Close

Hard to believe....  / Pradeep GanapathyRaj (Friend)

...that there is a "memory-of" website for Naveen. He was one of the most enthusiastic people I knew in BITS, with an ever-ready smile !  We spent some interesting time in Krishna Bhavan. Hard to believe it was a drowning accident that put an end to that smile :(   What else to say - may his soul rest in peace, and his memories will live longer in our minds.

-Pradeep/Kuupi

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Tribute to a dear friend  / Anand Rajan (Friend)
Navin was always enthusiastic about life and many a time he has enlivened a dull moment with one of his practical jokes at the expense of his mates. He was an extremely intelligent person with a passion for semiconductor Physics. A lot of us owe a great deal to him when it comes to having successfully navigated our Physics CDCs. It is incredibly sad to see such a promising career cut short by such a tragic disaster.

He will always be remembered as a true friend and as a terrific person to have around. I will never forget the good times I had in his company. May God give his family the strength to deal with this devastating loss.

Rest in Peace, my friend. Close

.. / Srivatsan Balasubramanian (Friend)
I am reminded of a tamil poem:

Thaedi choru dhinam thindru
pala chinnanchiru kadhaigaL pesi
vaadi thunbam miga uzhandru
pirar vaada pala seigai seidhu
narai koodi kizhapparuvam eidhi
kodum kootrukkirayaagi maayum
sila vedikkai manidharai poLavey
naanum veezhven endru ninaiththaayo?

- Subramania Bharathi

The English translation

Did you think, (Oh Time),
that i too would give up and fall ,
like these risible fools who -
in search of food,
in useless gossip,
in suffering,
in speaking ill and while spoken ill of
get older and die ?

Courtesy:
http://melancholetta.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_melancholetta_archive.html Close

From one of his wingies....  / Muthukumar S. (Wingie)
After we passed out from BITS, I had made every effort to meet the my wingies where ever they were. I even made a visit to US to meet our guys. The only guy whom I missed after campus is Navin and this would leave a pain inside me forever... I indeed spoke to him over the phone when his parents were there in Frankfurt.
I am more known by the name reddy and it is because of him...

Whether it is mathematics or music he was very confident of his subject...and he was the first Phd from our wing ........
I pray for him and his family....
Let god give enough strength for his family to overcome this...
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May his soul rest in peace  / Prasanna Kumar JSNS (Friend in BITS )
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Always Smiling ...  / Harish Yerneni (BITS Batch mate )
I have seen Navin many times during my stay at BITS. I have never spoken to him but my interaction is limited to watching him being active and smiling in BITS.

I lost a nice batchmate.

May God bless his soul and be with his family and friends.



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We miss you  / Srivatsan Balasubramanian (Friend and Wingie )

It was in the year of 1995 when a dozen people aspiring for engineering in various parts of India were thrown together in the desert land of Rajasthan to lead the four best years of their life filled with fun, frolic and adventure. The dozen formed a wing that was christened “MTV”, by one of its most creative members - Navin. The wing connected instantly. It is with pride that I write here that I belong to this wing and I spent my undergraduate life having riotous fun with these wonderful people. I would like to fondly reminisce here some of those undergrad days with Navin that I miss so deeply.

Navin was always our chief mischief maker. He was truly a colorful personage. His bubbly enthusiasm and good sense of humor made him the focal point of all our attention. He was a thoroughly adorable person and all the good, healthy jokes that he pulled on us only made us like him all the more.

Here is one incident that Navin pulled off on me. A gate call is a concept originated in pilani and is some kind of a protocol followed by a girl who has an intention to talk to a guy who resides inside the boys hostel. An invisible "lakshman rekha" surrounds the hostels. So girls do not enter he boys hostel and they convey the purpose of their visit to the first male that passes by. The male in turn acts as the messenger, conveys the message to the intended recipient who in turn steps out of the hostel to talk to the girl. Now, for most MTVites, gate call is an unknown protocol. After all, they never had any luck with girls. so, it was almost during my final year, that I received my first gate call from a friend that I had just made., Navin got to know that I had received this gate call. By, the time, I could get down stairs and meet the girl, he had assembled all the guys in the wing, informed them that I am attending to a gatecall, had run to the next wing and got hold of an expert drummer from the other wing, got him a drum and two sticks, improvised a song in my name and her name, and had the entire wing dance like a bunch of lunatics for the song.. It looked so outrageously funny and I could not get myself to talk to her when I reached downstairs for she could listen to the song and watch the dance from where she stood.. I was so disorientied that I stutttered, stammerd and fumbled for words.. It was only when I led her far, far away from the echo of the drum beats and songs, that I could finally get to talk to her.. All of this hungama for a girl who had just come to get back the book that i had borrowed from her :-) When I returned to the wing, I could not  help laughing at what he had done.

There was this one time when one of our wingies VK managed to impress one of the girls by hook or crook and somehow got himself an invite for the coveted "meera nite" which was the cultural festival of the girl's hostel.. now, stepping into the girl's hostel is considered a felony in pilani except for that one evening when the repressed menfolk are legally entitled with the opportunity to have a special darshan of meera bhawan’s interiors.. We were MTV"ites.. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that strongly bonded our wing together was that none of us had any luck with any girl whatsoever.. Naturally, when we noticed that VK was going astray from the rest of our wing, we had to bring him back to his senses.. And our wing, under the leadership of Navin, hatched a conspiracy.. We knew that VK was gullible and he would listen to pretty much whatever Navin would say.. Navin managed to persuade VK that if he wanted to impress the girls, he had to dress up like "real men" do.. He convinced VK to wear a suite, tie, black shoes and sun glasses (in the night) and go to the women's hostel for the fest..“Go show it to them, tiger”, he commented as VK started heading towards meera. We waited until late in the evening when VK returned fretting and sweating and grumbling only to see us rolling on the floor laughing at the joke that we had played on him.. the temperature read 120 F and all the guys and girls who landed up at the fest were dressed up in shorts, T-shirt and bathroom chappals.. and we had successfully made VK look like a buffoon for he was the only one spruced up in all formals for this casual event.

Another funny incident relates to a wingie who goes by the name MK. MK is a tall, thin funny looking guy. We knew that he was afraid of some of the stray dogs that were roaming the krishna bhawan corridors. These dogs are completely harmless and afraid of humans but they looked pretty sad. There were two kinds of dogs in pilani. Our wing had provided this taxonomy based on our calculus 101 that we were struggling with that semester. The first kind was "non-differentiable" dogs. These are the ones for which a function that could possibly characterize their profile could never have a derivate. And the other kind were called "discontinuous" dogs. These are the ones that were so distorted out of shape that a function that could possibly characterize their profiles may not even be continuous!  One of those days when MK was getting into a room which had a couple of cubes for showering, Navin had found a "non-differentiable" dog roaming near the corridor.. With a loaf of bread that he had got from the mess, he slowly tempted the dog step by step to get into the bath room.. and once the dog was in, Navin bolted the main door shut along with the unsuspecting MK inside it.. When MK was exited the cube after having a shower he realized that he was trapped in the room with a dog inside, he freaked out and started yelling at us to open the main door.. the rest of our wingies were outside the room rolling on the floor unable to hold our laughter back. MK locked himself up inside the cube again and refused to come out while the dog happily oblivious to the external world, sat next to the door, muching on the food that Navin had provided. Finally, Navin let the door open, fed the dog and let it go away ending the ordeal for MK. On many occasions, MK would fondly recollect this incident and how he enjoyed it afterwards. The dog would visit our wing frequently and Navin would feed it. Many of us in our wing would joke that Navin was training the dog for a future encounter with MK.

While Navin was playful and always up to some monkey business or the other, he had this softer and compassionate side too. Once, during the first semester, I had run into Navin's room to fetch some stuff. I slipped on a mat and fell over a chair and while trying to regain balance, ended up tipping a perfume bottle over. I remembered Navin telling me that the perfume he used was a very expensive one and it costed him around Rs. 600. I felt guilty about having broken his bottle and finally ended up drawing some money from my bank so as to pay him for the damage. While I offered him the amount, he firmly refused it and told me that he would imagine that he had slipped and fell over and broke the bottle himself. He reiterated that it was only an accident and so I couldn't have possibly done anything about it. I felt that he dealt with this situation in a very composed way and showed maturity that was beyond his age (he was only 17 then). I recall that I was moved by this gesture and we became very good friends after that. 

Later in the fourth year, when Venkatraman, one of our wingies and Navin’s best friend passed away in a rafting mishap, it was Navin who was constantly in touch with Venkatraman’s family providing them with some consolation.

Navin was brilliant in acads and our wingies would always look up to him and Kuma for all the solutions to homework problems – be it in classical mechanics or complex variables. An amusing thing about Navin is the way he would do math. He would never get bogged down by it no matter how hard the equations get. He would never give up and he would persevere to the extent that would make us wonder if he derived his energies from some super human powers. There was something amusing about the way he would solve equations. He used to work with a small two-sided black slate and a white chalk. He would write some equations on one side of the slate, and once he had completed a side, he would copy the result from this side to the next side and would continue working on the second side. Once he was finished with the second side, he would erase the first side with his hands and copy the last line from the second side again back on to the first side and start working from here. He would continue doing this back and forth. There was this once instance when I had asked him how to solve a particularly hard problem in solid state physics before the night of the exam. I started counting the number of times he turned the slate before he solved this problem. He worked on the problem for about two hours before he came up with the final answer which matched exactly with the solutions at the back of the book. By then, I had counted that he had turned the slate over for about 93 times !! I told him I had lost him somewhere along the way upon which he quickly erased both sides of the slate, “Let’s see what u did not follow” and started all over again.

Navin was an amazing conversationalist and a persuasive speaker. He could motivate and inspire people through his talk with effortless ease. I remember this one instance when I was doing my physics CDCs. I had the lowest pre-final exam total in the class of 36 people in Nuclear Physics. The professor warned us that the final exam was not going to be easy. I freaked out completely upon hearing this since I had not understood much in the course and I was scared that my GPA was going to plummet in case I performed poorly. It was during this testing time that Navin came to my rescue. He took me to the local canteen and went off on a long pep talk. He told me that I was capable of far more than what I thought of myself. He instilled the much needed confidence that if I studied hard enough and remain focused, I would be able to pull myself out of this mess. Inspired, I hit the library and worked meticulously with Navin checking on me if I was doing well and helping me with the problems every now and then. I ended up topping the final exams and received an excellent grade in the process. I have no clue what I would have done without him. It was also his suggestion that I should become the editor of the physics magazine in pilani. Over time, it has become one of my passions, and I had been an editor for many newsletters after coming to iowa state as well.

Navin had a great dressing sense. We would go around window shopping in Chennai , with him giving me tips on state of the art in the fashion world. He had this uncanny ability to spot the exclusive classy restaurants and eat out places in the city which otherwise would remain unknown to the most of us. He had this ever burning desire to learn new things. His passion for photography, Karnatic music and VLSI research was unparalled in our wing. He was exceptionally good at writing and he wrote all of the humorous character sketches of our wingies that were read out during our graduation dinner in pilani. I had the chance to meet some of his friends from ucsb as well and I feel good that he had a fairly closely knit group that he lived with during his graduate days.

At the end, here is what I have to say about Navin. The man had real class. He lived in real style. Amongst other things, he had a heart of gold. I am glad that he lived happily as long as he lived. We will miss him.  May God take care of him well.

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.. / Balamurali (Batchmate in BITS )
Navin, a guy no-one will miss loving. I came to know of him more closely in the 3rd year of BITS Pilani.  His love for Carnatic music, photography etc. is unmatchable. He was a brilliant guy, used to teach me concepts of electronics and Physics. He gave me all the encouragement I needed to go for a very theoretical Masters Thesis in BITS.

I now rue the fact that I never got a chance to meet him after we passed out from BITS.  Wud miss him very much.





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Awsome personage  / Prakash Krishnamoorthy (Friend)
It's a shame he has ceased to exist. If I were to pull one guy, just one person, back from the abyss, it would be him.
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Great Character  / Gowtham Vemulapalli (friend)
Navin is a great character. I knew him from BITS. Even though I didnot interact with him as much as I would have wished, I came to know more about him through our common friends. He is a very joyous person. May his soul rest in peace. Close

.... / Sathya S.
It was sometime in my first year that I saw a notice in KG mess about selections for the college CRICKET team. I, having represented my school, was confident that I would get selected. This was when I met Navin and Rajesh. 

We all made it to the team and soon became good friends. I especially remember the time when he fractured his elbow during one of our cricket practise sessions. I took care of him for a couple of days and it was "Music Nite" that day. GSU (Krishna warden that time) requested (rather I should say ORDERED) both of us to stay back and after seeing the obvious disppointment writ all over our faces, he politely (a rare gesture to expect from GSU) advised us. 

We got to know each other quite well in the first 2 years and after our 2nd year, the Physics gang moved to RBM and there wasn't much interaction between us. We again got together during our RPA days, but they were all quite busy concentrating on their so called CDCs. I would never forget those first 2 years or nets/lachha sessions.

Navin (aka Pattani), as Rajesh always used to call him, you will forever live in our hearts......
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