Prof. Dhananjay Madhav Dhamdhere passed away on 28 Nov 2020 at his home in Nasik due to a massive cardiac arrest. This was a sudden and totally unexpected event leaving no time for any medical help to be provided to him. He is survived by his wife Mrs. Lata Dhamdhere and two sons Ashay and Amogh (both Ph.D.s) and their families. He was born on 7 March 1949. He finished B.Tech., M.Tech, and Ph.D., all from IIT Bombay in 1970, 1972, and 1979, respectively. He joined IIT Bombay as a Research Associate in 1972, and became an Assistant Professor in 1974, Associate Professor in 1983, and a Professor in 1985. He led the CSE department as its Head from 1997 to 2000. He retired from regular service in 2014 but continued as an Emeritus Fellow until 2017. After leaving the institute in 2017, he moved to Thane and had a house in Nasik too.

Prof. Dhamdhere, fondly known as DMD, was associated with the Department of Computer Science since its inception and has played a major role in shaping the department into what it is today. Old timers in the department recall that in the early days of the department, he was the first person to emphasize research, and more importantly, publishing research results. His students fondly recall his admonishment: “As a society, we are second rate only because we believe we are second rate’’. It was his firm opinion that we are much more capable than what we seem to have accomplished. It is out of this belief that he kept the bar of his expectations from people around him, rather high. It is no wonder that he was a tough task master and was quite intolerant of sloppiness and dishonesty. Many of us owe our growth to DMD’s pushing us. Although he was a strict disciplinarian, he was also very jovial and witty --- all one had to do to enjoy this side of his, was to avoid sloppiness and dishonesty.

DMD earned his right of high expectations from people from the exacting standards that he used for himself too and believed in leading by example. He was very meticulous, hardworking, punctual, and regular in his work. He worked on difficult research problems and pushed his students and collaborators and took a major share of responsibilities. He was very articulate and expressed his opinions only when he was crystal clear about what he wanted to say. As a consequence, his opinions used to be based on deep thoughts and hence usually were strong and unwavering. He never hesitated in taking an uncompromising stand on the matters that he believed strongly in. Even in the case of difference of opinion with him, people would unhesitatingly concede that he had the interest of the department and the institute uppermost in his mind. He is famously known to have taken servious view of cheating even before official rules came into existence. He spearheaded the efforts in the institute for creation of rules governing academic malpractices.

DMD was known to be a captivating teacher. He had an uncanny ability to bring out the nuts and bolts of a topic and lay the matter threadbare in front of his class. This often led to the “Aha” moments for many of his students. His lectures were very carefully planned and he always knew exactly what he wanted to cover and how he wanted to cover it. He was equally concerned about the students outside of IITs and wrote the following books: Compiler Construction -- Principles and Practice; Introduction to System Software; Systems Programming and Operating Systems; and Operating Systems, a Concept-Based Approach. They were published by Tata McGraw Hill and Macmillan India. Together, there were over 50 (yes, over fifty!) reprints of the books! Some of them were also translated into Chinese and Korean languages. These books continue to be in print and almost every student who did his undergraduate education in India has used one of these books.

DMD’s main areas of interest were Optimizing Compilers, Data Flow Analysis, and Distributed Systems. He published in top avenues in these areas such as TOPLAS, PoPL, and PLDI. In fact his paper in PoPL 1993 was the first ever paper from researchers working in India in this premier conference, no one before him reached this pinnacle of research in India. The most interesting aspect is that his research was motivated by his strong hold on practice: He wrote a FORTRAN compiler called IITFORT for EC1030 computer at IIT Bombay, way back in 1977. It was primarily motivated from the fact that the existing compiler was muti-pass and required loading card decks multiple times for compilation. Besides, the error reporting was not very precise leading to many compilation runs of the program. DMD was unhappy with the state of the affairs and hence he led a team that developed a fast single-pass compile-link-and-go compiler system with excellent diagnostics in the form of error detection and reporting. The compilation by IITFORT was about 10 times faster than the compiler supplied by the manufacturer of EC1030 but the exhaustive checks for run time errors slowed down the execution a bit. Thus on the whole, the system processed (i.e. compiled and executed) student jobs (i.e. programs) 6 to 10 times faster. It was an engineering feat and clever design that allowed him to keep all the tables in the main memory so that the compilation is fast.

Interestingly, for all his deep focus on academics, DMD was physically very fit; it is rather ironic that such a fit person should pass away in this manner at the age of 71. In fact he was one of the fittest persons in the department among all faculty and students. He used to play cricket and some colleagues still recall his square cut off fast balls. He was an avid trekker. He introduced many colleagues and students to trekking in the Sahyadris and also took them to advanced treks. He was fond of rich Indian culture and had a lot of knowledge about local traditions as well as about Mumbai city. Those were the pre-google days and his presence was very useful for the people in the department, most of whom came from outside of Mumbai.

Closer to his retirement, DMD launched the Forum for Academic Culture (FAC) at IIT Bombay. He was convinced that as the size of the institute was increasing, the communication between people was reducing. He felt that it was very important for people to keep talking about academics: the process of academics, various forces and expectations influencing academics, about the teaching methods as the class size grew, about the motivation of students and teachers alike. FAC provided a platform for people to come together and share their concerns and opinions.

On the whole, DMD was a towering and yet very down-to-earth personality and is remembered for his incredibly high standards of excellence, integrity, honesty, and his dedication to IIT Bombay. We are happy that we crossed paths with DMD and could walk some distance with him. Although we will miss him, the principles that he held dearly will continue to guide us in future too and we will continue to strive to live up to the expectations that he had from us.

May his soul rest in peace.

[The CSE, IIT Bombay Family]