Guru of Google, son-in-law of Gujarat

" Glad to read what you wrote last week about the unknowns of Google . I want to point out one more unknown thing about Google ...'' After writing an article in ' Technoworld ' earlier this month to mark 25 years of Google, an elderly reader called and started the conversation something like this. He further said that " My son-in-law , Rajiv Motwani , was instrumental in the establishment of Google." " All the talk of the elder was locked on the internet. Then they have to meet face to face!

That elder is Subhadrasinhji Jadeja, a scion of the royal family of Virpur near Rajkot. Now his age is around 90. His daughter Ashabehan went to study in America in the 80s. There he came in contact with another Indian, Rajiv Motwani. Rajiv was born in Jammu and brought up in Delhi. The introduction progressed and with the consent of the families they got married.

At that time, Rajiv was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Many university students used to approach him for guidance. Two of those students were somewhat different. Their complications and questions were also different. These two students are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Professor Rajeev Motwani, who studied in IIT Kanpur, was brilliant , and these two students of his were also very bright. As his project, he was aiming to develop ' something ' that would give people the information they need from webpages on the Internet in an accurate manner . That project went on to become the Google search engine.

It started in a garage. Subhadrasinhji says that it was at Rajiv's request that his wife Ashabeh gave the first check to support the two students (Ashabeh is now a venture capitalist in the US). After the founding of Google, Professor Motwani became a member of its Technical Advisory Council. Professor Motwani was an expert in computer science research in databases , data mining , web search and information retrieval. He was highly respected in the academic world, especially for his research on " Randomized Algorithms " .

Rajeev Motwani was the founder of many other Silicon Valley startups. Unfortunately, he died in 2009 at the age of 47. In memory and in honor of Professor Rajiv Motwani, Google Company has started ' The Rajiv Motwani Professorship in Computer Science ' program at Stanford. After his death, Sergey Brin wrote on his blog that " We sat together for hours thinking , discussing and brainstorming. With the guidance of Professor Motwani we were able to develop a very useful algorithm for searching. The scope of his guidance was not limited to Google. If you come in contact with any kind of technology today, chances are that Rajiv Motwani is involved in it in some way or the other. ''