Varahur Srinivasa Satyanarayana


Varahur Srinivasa Satyanarayana was an Indian engineer, inventor, philosopher, linguist and Indian Army colonel.

Early life

Satyanarayana was born on 22 August 1922 to a middle-class family in Varahur in the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu. He was the youngest of 6 sons and the 9th of 10 children. He was born on Saraswati Puja day - the ninth day of Dussehra or Navaratri.
He was raised in an extended family with his siblings and cousins. His education was halted by his father's sudden death, when Satyanarayana was just 14. He passed his intermediate examination and began to work in a steel plant in Jamshedpur, India, while joining a night college. He did not wish to be a burden to his elder brothers. He worked and studied hard and passed his engineering examination. Later, he graduated as an Electrical Engineer, via a correspondence course from British Correspondence and became an Associate Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Then he joined the Indian Army.
His native language was Tamil. Having grown up in Andhra Pradesh, he had studied Telugu as his first language. At the age of twenty he started learning Tamil on his own and became fluent in Sanskrit.

Career

He perfected a fuel-saving device that he hoped that the Indian Army could use and built an alternate device replacing expensive piston rings in army trucks. His articles were published in Invention Intelligence magazine.