Choosing a name for this blog was no easy task—every option seemed to capture a different piece of who Raj was. After much thought, 'Code to Curiosity' felt like the perfect reflection of Raj's work: the brilliant coder whose boundless curiosity kept us all on our toes. Though his passing was one of the saddest moments in our lives, I want this to be a highlights package of the remarkable journey we shared with him. Raj's life was filled with brilliant work and infectious curiosity, and I hope to leave behind lasting memories of our time together.
The first time we knew this boy was special was when he contributed to this paper - https://worldcomp-proceedings.com/proc/p2015/SAM9762.pdf. At Cognizant we had what was called the Global Technology Office, that came up with these 'paper ideas' and those of us running respective Businesses (we ran Information Security as a service to clients) had to align with their recommendations to make the idea more customer relevant. Raj was hardly 3+ years in his job role and typically - developers at that level are not a part of such initiatives. He understood the relevance of statistical variables in anonymity, diversity and closeness better than most of us, so much so that he ended up wiring this to a data masking/ encryption solution that we were selling to the Customer, quite immediately.
Consequently, he was on fast-track to be running a productized solution (we called it Data Obscure), that too from a Services organization, but with the rigor of having a release cycle, handling multiple clients, moving this to the Cloud and finding added value through papers such as these!
He was a very difficult person to be kept quiet... or with unary tasks. For every task given to him, he will come back with 10 more on ways he can improve and improvise. Honestly, I had to learn about Entropy offline - only to be more informed and educated in handling his queries on this topic. Every morning he will walk into either my desk or that of Vignesh (one of our other leads) and just like GPT has a "stop sequence"- we literally have to send him back to his desk with a lot of effort to focus on one single task - with some stop sequence or the other :-)
Naturally, someone with this sort of technical acumen grew fast and stayed close to pretty much every other new initiative we began in the last 7+ years. Splunk was becoming popular and Raj took to it like fish to water. Great coders are most times great with queries as well. Raj was no exception. He mastered Lucene sooner than anyone else and that got him a head start in not just completing his own Architect and other certifications in Splunk but also in supporting others to get there.
Fast forward to the Covid period - he was already the owner and custodian of the product architecture, extensions and was now an accomplished engineer on the Cloud as well. He had this lined up to be taken into the AWS marketplace, with all the clarity and depth required for it to be a clear and modular solution in that ecosystem. All this happened in the middle of his learning more on Security Analytics, Cloud Security, database activity monitoring and some Web Access Management as well (Imperva if am not wrong was reviewed for this purpose for one of his clients at that time!)
And by the way, Covid gave him that much more airtime to think, by his standards - am told he built his own 3-D printer as well! He had a mechanical keyboard and was always thrilled at anything that could transcended from his logical output / outcome to a more physical outcome such as the 3-D printed slab or plastic!
And then came LLM! Some of us had some NLP background - with the likes of NLTK, SpaCy etc. but then I honestly don't know if Raj learned those. Open AI basically changed the world by saying how you can have a meaningful, semantic "chat" with your own data! At least for the engineering community, that was the romance that was unbelievable to start with! It was around November '22 (if am not wrong) that GPT became a sensation and in possibly less than 3 months, Raj knew LangChain and Llama Index better than any of us in the team! We had a tough customer in Google where we had to desperately demonstrate some value in the middle of an escalation, and once again - it was his demo on finding LLM relevance to a complicated code review/ human intervention led process - that saved the day for us with Google! He soon became the pillar of all things 'Security Agents' on LLM, that soon made way for others in the team to building Sailpoint Agents, CyberArk agents, Okta agents, and so on!
And now it hurts! That small little WhatsApp window is now quiet! There are no more - unending stream of ideas on what more we can do with LLM! what more can be 3-d printed! He put up a strong and positive face with us, even a week ago, when we met him at his place! It's hard to believe that we've seen the start to end of an amazing little career, right in front of our eyes, and that it's over!
He was a bundle of curiosity, kindness and brilliance, that has enriched our lives, in more ways than we can capture in this blog! To Raj’s family, we are profoundly grateful for the gift of his presence in our lives. His brilliance, kindness, and insatiable curiosity were a testament to the love and values you instilled in him. His light will continue to shine through us who had the privilege of knowing and working closely with him.
Lovely....sad that he was taken away too soon :(
ReplyDeleteRaj Na, use to delegate work to us so that we get our handson to the work and learn. Lovely article. Always be missed. From CDO team...
ReplyDeleteA fitting tribute to a truly brilliant mind. His curiosity knew no bounds. Back in 2019 he told me he used to develop a video game at home. He invested every moment of his life in something of value. And his mind wasn't limited to the computing world. He was an admirer of philosophy and literature too.
ReplyDeleteHis kindness and compassion over all of his other wondrous qualities made him a gem of a human being.
In Memory of Raj
ReplyDeleteRaj will always be remembered. Back in 2022, he was not only one of my internship trainers and the POC for my internship project, but he was also my first manager when I joined Cognizant in Cognizant Data Obscure team. Raj had a unique way of motivating our team, encouraging us to push boundaries and strive for excellence. He believed in doing what was best not just for the project, but for each of us individually.
More than just a manager, Raj was a mentor to me. His guidance paved the way for my journey into the CDO project, and I am forever grateful for the wisdom he imparted during the early stages of my career. The values and lessons I learned from him will continue to guide me, and I am committed to passing them on to those who follow in my footsteps.
Words cannot fully capture the respect and admiration I have for Raj. In this difficult time, we all must come forward to support Raj's family emotionally, physically, financially and any other way possible.
I've known Raj for over a decade, starting from his early days as a developer on one of the projects I managed. Even then, his exceptional technical abilities and passion for coding were evident. His journey with us, including the recent focus on GenAI strategy for security, showcased his relentless drive for innovation and technical excellence.
ReplyDeleteHe was never content with the status quo and constantly pushed boundaries, often requiring us to balance his forward-thinking ideas with practical business needs. While many spoke of possibilities, Raj was busy turning theories into tangible results, demonstrating his lab work in Gen AI for security. His contributions, including his impactful presentations to leadership and clients, were a testament to his hold on technology and expertise.
Beyond his technical brilliance, Raj was an invaluable team player. He inspired and mentored many colleagues who have grown into experts themselves. His influence was significant, and his knowledge was a cornerstone for many of us, including myself. Whenever I discuss Gen AI, Raj’s impact is unmistakable, and I owe that to him.
He will be remembered for his exceptional skills and the kind of person he was—a brilliant mind and a generous mentor. My heart goes out to his family during this incredibly difficult time, especially to his father. I hope they find strength in the cherished memories of a remarkable son and in all that Raj has left with them.
My first memory of Raj was when he came to me and asked for a change. I was the Operations Manager, and Raj's batch had completed training, and on induction to the group, he was assigned to VA team.
ReplyDeleteHowever, he had requested for change to Development oriented project. He earnestly explained that he had always been interested in development and had been doing one or the other project in his free time. I didnt take his words at face value, but nevertheless did assign him to help with Data Obscure. That was one of the best investments for Data Obscure that we had ever made. Somehwere in the journey, i stopped trying to stop or slow him down and let him take over.He grew in strength from a developer to a lead and being responsible for Product Tech-Stack. He laid out the entire SDLC process along with Tooling and Product Architecture.
Like others, quite a lot of our mornings in Perungudi office would be to listen to him talk on his latest technical explorations and make sense of his mind. I had always enamoured on his ability to get deep and ahead in technology. He had expressed his interests on philosophy and used to speak on those as well. I regret not having spent a good deal of time on those topics outside of technology.
Ultimately, its saddening to see his time cut short
Thanks everyone ... can't believe it is a week already. Time flies... but we want to hold these thoughts in a place that will stay preserved and honor Raj for what he left behind.
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