Kailasam Venkatesan (1932–2019)

It was four hours to tick for the arrival of the New Year 2020 when we heard the news that Prof. K. Venkatesan passed away peacefully at home. He is survived by his wife, Meenakshi, daughter Raji, son-in-law Dinakar and two grand children. Thus the year end marked the demise of an individual who possessed a polite unending charisma and simplicity par excellence. Crystallography (and crystallographers) has lost yet another significant teacher and a researcher from the old school which cared for rigour and precision. Venkatesan (KV for many in India, Seppli for the Zurich group and Ven for the rest of the world) was born on 29 April 1932 at Madras (now Chennai) in India. I wrote to Buergi about the demise of KV and asked him about the origin of the name Seppli ? Here is what he wrote, ‘…the name “seppli” dates back to ven’s first stay in switzerland in the lab of jack dunitz, probably in the early sixties (before my time there). Apparently the then Ph D students had a bit of a problem with the unusual first and family names, so – for reasons unknown to me – they started to call ven “seppli”, which is the diminutive form of “sepp” which in turn is a swiss version of Josef. thus “seppli” was a kind of nickname with an undertone of endearment and “seppli” stuck with ven ever after...’