OBITUARY

Professor Man Mohan Choudhary
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

An irreparable deep void in creative graphic arts community has suddenly appeared with the sad demise of Professor Man Mohan Choudhary in sleep in the night between August 15th and 16th 2013.

Man Mohan had come to IIT Kanpur towards the end of 1960s after finishing his doctoral work at Columbia University (in US). IIT Kanpur was a very young institute at that time and had a fair number of young faculty. The campus was secluded from the city and this, in a way, helped a very thriving social interaction on the campus. With their congenial nature Dhruti and Man Mohan had become, unknowingly, a hub of this social group. In those early days commercial television broadcasting had not yet started and people did get their evenings free to visit each other and know each other. But one could see that things were going to change.

IIT Kanpur had a small television center of its own which used to broadcast, after prior announcement, some programs of interest to local community. Technical support to this center had come from Kanpur Indo American Program (KIAP) and it was initiated by Professor William. F. Schreiber of MIT who had come as a visiting professor at Kanpur. But this center also needed some persons to produce these local programs and MMC, gracefully, volunteered for this job. Slowly demand started growing that IITK TV center should also produce and broadcast educational programs for enhancing awareness about science. It was to honor this demand that Man Mohan moved to Electrical Engineering Department (which was administering the TV center) from the department of Chemistry But very soon he found to his satisfaction that arena was muvh bigger and moved to NCERT and UGC to carry on his work on production of Educational TV Programs on Science. ATOM, one of his productions, has won many laurels.

Today commercial television broadcasting has become very mature and there are several educational broadcasts. But with passing away of Man Mohan the country has lost one of the early pioneers of this field. Let us all join to pray that his soul rest in peace and that Dhruti and family get the strength to bear the irreparable loss.

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