Meeting Personalities

Interviews for Meet

The Meet column on Sunday in The Hindu has been my favourite space where I have pursued several intersting people for an interview. It has been in a wide and varied field beginning from Prof. Sultan Ahmed Ismail, the Managing Director of the Ecoscience Research Foundation. A champion for the cause of vermi-composting of organic wastes, he is an advocate of segregation of wastes at source and organic farming.
There have been interviews of the Veena maestro Kalpakam Swaminathan - who at around 86 years of age now - stands a lone sentinel for Veena, the National Instrument of India. Then there has been another interview of P.S. Ramamurti, Secretary of The Egmore Samskrt School, for his efforts in conducting Bhagavad Gita chanting competitions for the past 50 years.
Cooks Sanjeev Kapoor of Khana Khazana fame, Prof. of Nutrition Chandra Venkatasubramanian and much recently Jacob Aruni for his research on ancient Kongunadu and other recipes of India, have been featured on various occasions.
Prof. Ramani Narayan of the Michigan State University, had appeared in one of the Meet interviews for his pioneering research work in introducing bio-degradable plastics in the Harita-NTI in Chennai.
Bordering on the area of spirituality and human resources management have appeared interviews of Sunanda Parthasarathy and Swami A. Parthasarathy who frequent Chennai to give their lectures on the Bhagavad Gita.
I stumbled on Rev. Jegath Gaspar Raj as a Catholic priest who had a penchant for studying the Tamil Saivaite text of Tiruvasagam and that was a meet interview that appeared much before the release of an audio album titled Tiruvasagam in Symphony by Isaignani Illaiyaraja. There was also an interview of S. Tatwamasi Dixit, founder of the Ojas Foundation on the occasion of his winning the Maharishi Badarayan Award.
The meet interview that appeared today was on Dr. Asana Andiappan who was recently in the news for demanding the appointment of trained Yoga teachers.
There may be many that I have left out and many many interesting personalities that I still look forward to meet and write about.