Mourning the Kabir of the Silicon Valley
June 8, 2009
When I read about Rajeev Motwani’s death on Saturday, a wild thought coursed through my mind — who can lay claim to the legacy of this tech mentor?
Is it Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, who, upon hearing about his death, made the following entry in his blog “Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it?”
At another place Brin wrote, “his (Rajeev’s) legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched.”
It made me think, isn’t Motwani, the Stanford University professor and one of the earliest mentors to Google and Paypal, a bit like the mystical Indian poet Kabir?
Kabir was born a Hindu and raised by a Muslim weaver couple. But as long as Kabir lived, he denounced all sects, only to lead one of the most influential reformist movements of his time — the non-divisive Bhakti movement?
Knowledge, as Kabir propositioned is no one’s proprietary. It’s like water that’s free flowing and will find its own crevices and nooks to fill. Legend has it that when Kabir died, his Muslim and Hindi followers got into a slug fest over whether he should be given a burial or be cremated. However when they lifted the sheet that covered his body, the body was gone, thus ending the conflict that would have led to a bloody split!
The doors of the 1988 Berkeley PhD and a 1983 IIT-Kanpur graduate, we are told were open to one and all. “There wasn’t a start-up he didn’t love,” wrote Motwani’s friend and blogger Om Malik.
As one of the savviest investors at Silicon Valley, Motwani’s research spanned diverse fields in computer science, including databases, data mining, and data privacy; web search and information retrieval; robotics; computational drug design; and theoretical computer science.
Today, it may appear as common sense, but when Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd wrote a paper, “What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket” in 1998, no one had heard of PageRank that later became the fundamental building block for a search engine called Google.
Motwani’s life, as the lives of others like him, bears testimony to one universal truth — that knowledge transcends boundaries. You cannot fetter it to one country or geography. Such measures only makes those countries knowledge-poor.
I wonder what Motwani fans would like to say about Obama government’s fettering of the outsourcing trend….?
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[...] like to express our condolences to Motwani’s family and friends. Om Malik, who knew Rajeev Mourning the Kabir of the Silicon Valley – outsourceportfolio.com 06/08/2009 When I read about Rajeev Motwani’s death on Saturday, a wild [...]
The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.