Nomination of Dr. Muralee Thummarukudy (T. R. Muraleedharan)

For

IIT-K@50 Celebrating Alumni Achievements

Back in July 1986, when I joined IIT-Kanpur as an M.Tech. student in Civil Engineering (Environmental Engineering specialisation), I was invited to a Meet-and-Greet at the Environmental Engineering Laboratory for an introduction to the EE family. Those days were heady and hectic as we were meeting scores of new people from all over the country, and their names and faces were fleeting. The eight new students were asked to introduce ourselves and tell why we chose to do our Masters in Environmental Engineering. Predictable answers flowed: “….I want to save the environment…”, or “…I want to contribute to environmental research…”, or some other variant of the same theme. And then, the new student with a thick malayalee accent said…. “If I could, I would rather study history because I am interested in people, but there are no jobs for history specialists and so I chose the environmental field”. There was shocked silence in the room for a few moments. I kept thinking…what a dumb and irreverent answer. We had just been through a wrenching national competition including the dreaded interview process, and he was fortunate to be selected to this esteemed institution, and here he is, showing his non-chalance, not even aware of his display of ignorance in front of the professors….he sure won’t last more than one semester. He continued… “I mention this because there is such a disconnect between what we want to do in our lives and what we actually end up doing…”. That was T. R. Muraleedharan, from a small village in Kerala. Over the next two years, I got to know Muralee well and saw that he was a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a thoughtful, no-nonsense guy firmly rooted in his Kerala culture, who was intelligent and smart, and who went on to do very well in all the courses. While some of us were agonizing over which topic to choose for our thesis, his unique viewpoint was once again displayed….you see, growing up in Kerala, he had observed that farmers used copper sulphate to kill unwanted mushrooms in the fields, but no one had seen it in reverse angle…..why not use the same weed to remove heavy metals from wastewaters? A novel concept that triggered keen interest in his supervisor, and his thesis spawned additional masters’ and doctoral level research in the field. He went on to complete his Ph.D. at IIT-K.

At IIT-K, I witnessed the beginning of a long and illustrious progress of a true IIT-K product, but I did not imagine that his career would take him on an international pathway that some of us could only dream of. Before landing at his current job, Muralee worked in various organizations and studied the impact of petroleum industry on Mumbai’s environment, studied the impact of Indonesia’s forest fires on Brunei’s air quality, implemented environmental management system in Shell’s operations in the Middle-East, just to name a few accomplishments.

All this seems to have been mere training grounds for what certainly has been an action packed, jet setting, and professionally fulfilling years at the United Nations Environment Program’s Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch based in Geneva, Switzerland. Muralee was based in Geneva until recently, as the Operations Manager for the Branch, but work has now taken him a step closer to where the action is. In his current occupation as the Special Coordinator for Disaster Response, he is now the man responsible for designing and implementing rapid response on behalf of UNEP in countries impacted by natural disasters or human conflict—regions that we only see on a newspaper’s front page. Muralee has designed such responses and was directly involved in action in China after the earthquake, Myamar after the cyclone, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia, Afghanistan, and the occupied Palestinian territories after the conflicts and a range of countries after the tsunami. Due to the high-risk nature of his work, he never lets his team members go to a region without visiting it and assessing its safety and security. Often, the areas are riddled with physical danger, basic amenities are not always available, and the mission is not always accomplished as planned. It speaks to Muralee’s well-grounded sense of belonging, that never has he complained about his personal hardships, instead concentrating on the manifold miseries that the local population faces, and rejoicing on their innate ability to cope and make do under horrific conditions. In his job, he is also in charge of traveling to some of the richest world capitals to educate and cajole them into donating enough money for such rehabilitation. His network of contacts spans many people—rich and poor , young and old, educated and those waiting to be educated.

One of Muralee’s passions is writing, which he discovered just after leaving IIT-K. He has become a fertile writer on wide ranging topics—and with his wit, unique outlook, and analysis, often combines his writing on both science and society. Thanks to the age of internet, his articles and essays are there for all to see, and we are all wiser because of that.

His writings make us stop and think on what we tend to consider “routine” or “just the way they are”. He looks at common day-to-day activities and points out the lessons offered by ordinary life around us. In the early 1990s, he published a hilarious, honest look at the subjective nature of environmental impact assessments called “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” for which he was honoured with a Best Paper Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Since that time, he has written many essays on, among other things, the state of the environment in India, and the state of education in India. Every single one of them is worth a read and further reflection.

There is often a belief in current India that in order to succeed in corporate circles and in management, one needs to sport a cosmopolitan and polished mask over who we really are, and perhaps learn the various western accents of English and, may be, even change our names from Krishna to Chris or Sujatha to Sue. There is also our cultural emphasis on age-based wisdom, wherein we placed high value to wise elders, and the younger generation were expected to revere elders because, well, they were older.

In my opinion, Muralee has countered both beliefs. He is a living example of a man whose life experiences and wisdom are disproportionate to his relatively young age, and has shown that success comes with hard work, compassion, well-grounded wisdom, all the while sporting the same old thick malayalee accent. How many of us can really claim of achieving the high ideal of “saving the world”? Muralee is perhaps the only one I personally know who can claim he came very close to it on a global scale.

By doing so, he has been a worthy ambassador for India, Kerala, IIT-K, and has been a true role model for us all. In many ways, we take vicarious pleasure in Muralee’s success. He carries the aspirations of a lot of us IITians who started out with idealistic intentions but settled down to what we could achieve. His success is our success. I am very proud and honoured to nominate him for the IIT-K’s Distinguished Alumni Award for this year.

Notes: – Muralee’s website is www.muraleethummarukudy.com

– UNEP PostConflict website is http://www.unep.org/conflictsanddisasters/

Sincerely,

B. R. Ravishankar

Director, Processing and Research Facilities Division

Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission

Ottawa, Canada

OttawaRavi@yahoo.com

1-613-836-0230