A Life Lost Too Soon and an irreversible loss for YPS.
YPS has lost the most dedicated person who worked for the all round progress of the club and kept its flag flying high. He was an inspiration not only for the Executive Committee but to all members of YPS. We shall miss you Murali but you will remain in our thoughts and be a guiding force in every step that YPS shall take in its path of progress. Rest in Peace, dear friend, mentor, guide and inspiration.
Murali Santhanam, born on January 15, started his career in 1980 when he joined as a Probationary Officer in Indian Overseas Bank. After a few years of over-the-counter services, he joined the team responsible for implementation of technology in the bank and was the architect of online banking applications for the branch.
Later he joined IBM and held various management and executive positions. He was also a professionally qualified Project Manager and held different honorary positions in PMI Bangalore, India Chapter.
He was a member of ‘Vismaya’, a group engaged in using photography for social causes to make lives better. The team has collectively held numerous exhibitions to raise funds for supporting human causes like Rural Education, Autism and Cancer in Children.
His interest in photography was kindled during his early age by a book titled ‘Kodak Camera Guide’. The interest grew when he met Mr H Satish and Mr Goutham Ramesh in 2003 and enrolled as a member of YPS. He became a Life Member in 2005, joined the YPS Executive Committee as a Director in 2016 and continued in various positions until 2022. He loved shooting Nature, Architecture, Landscapes and Cityscapes. Over a period, he had developed his own style creating minimalistic pictures with fewer elements. He also believed in using the latest techniques in photo capturing and post-processing to create near life reproduction of the scenes. Some of the techniques that he used were HDR, Focus Stacking and Exposure Blending. He loved taking pictures at night and blue hour.
Murali’s contribution to YPS has been multi pronged, especially when he was in the Executive Committee in different roles. As members of the Executive Committee we all looked upon him for decisions and policy making as he came from a professional background, with clarity of thought and with progress of the club, first and foremost at heart. He took on a designation as was the need of the hour. Thus from a Vice President’s role he moved on to being a Treasurer so he could streamline accounting and financial book-keeping of the club.
His greatest and everlasting contribution is when he took up the task of developing a state of the art salon software. He worked day and night and came up with a first of its kind website not only for submission of pictures but for in-hall judging as well. When the pandemic struck and in-hall judging could not be undertaken due to governmental restrictions, he immediately developed an on-line judging and virtual exhibition software for the 2020 salon where Girish Ananthamurthy was the Chairman and I was the Secretary. It was exciting to have the remote salon judging process live on Facebook, with the scoring of images by jury available in real-time for the participants and photography lovers across the globe. This was the first of its kind in the country, if not the world.
In the YPS National Salon 2021, when I was given the role of Chairperson, he implemented all our ideas of downloadables like ‘Proud Participant’ and a printable ‘Tent Card’ Certificates for salon participants. Innumerable additions, improvements and innovations were made by him from all the fanciful ideas we gave him! That was his spirit of taking up challenges! He also developed an exclusive member contest and exhibition site called memex.ypsbengaluru.com. A competition website was in great demand from other organisations. Since he wanted to keep the YPS Salon Website exclusive for the club, he developed another version, https://contest.ypsbengaluru.com/ to host competitions of other organisations.
His latest contribution was to make the salon software so user-friendly for Vikas, Anitha and me to handle all the backend work without his involvement for the YPS National Salon 2023. Murali was the Webmaster for all our salons and for the first time we had to find a replacement. In order to complete his task of enabling the three of us to handle all steps involved with the salon, he worked from his hospital bed over months, while undergoing treatment.
Murali leaves behind his mother, wife, daughter, son and grandchildren.
Om Shanti.
Prema Kakade
Secretary, YPS
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