[KDE-India] RIP Atul Chitnis

[Manish Chakravarty]

Hello everyone,

I met Atul Chitnis in 2001 as a 17-year old college student in LB/2001. (
Linux Bangalore 001, the precursor to FOSS.in )

I continued to interact with him online and offline, off and on since then.

A funny moment that I can recall - I was on a flight from Bangalore to
Pune. He was sitting across the aisle. I was  thinking of a geeky way to
say 'hi' - so I tweeted "hey look to your right " - his reply was "it's
time to switch off our electronic gadgets and squeeze my stomach into the
economy class seat."

Amongst his talks "Lessons from German Potato Salad" at Linux Bangalore
2003 was the favorite talk of his that I attended.

He started off with "what on earth does an open source conference have to
do with a potato salad? " - doing some sort of a self parody - and cracking
up the audience and then gaining their attention in his keynote speech. His
talk had actually nothing to do with a German Potato Salad as he himself
said at the end of the talk. He wanted people to feel curios about the
topic and attend the talk. The JN Tata Auditorium was standing-room-only.
Atul did have his way.

( Thankfully the summary and the slides of his talk are still available at
http://linux-bangalore.org/2003/schedules/talkdetails.php?talkcode=A202 -
do go through it.)

I also remember getting into heated debates with him on a myriad of topics
( from Nokia E series phones vs BlackBerry, to how much one should quote
the previous email while replying to one )

Atul was a contrarian, a fierce debater and one generally learnt something
from him, even if proven wrong.

RIP, Atul.

https://plus.google.com/103417733087699539389/posts/SZBG8mEXTBD
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