Naa Govindasamy

Who was Naa Govindasamy?

Naa Govindasamy was one of the pioneers of the Tamil on the Internet.

Naa Govindasamy, a lecturer at the National Institute of Education, worked to develop the Singapore 16 bit Unicode system which uses Tamilnet and Tamilfix fonts and enables a user to input Tamil in all three computer platforms - Windows, Mac and Unix. These fonts enable a user to read emails and web pages in Tamil on a terminal with only a shell account.

Amongst his other achievements, since 1965 Govindasamy wrote short stories. In 1977 in Singapore, he initiated the Ilakkiya Kalam which gathered and analysed the best stories of the period and subsequently a collection of the best short stories of 1977 was published in 1981. He published a collection of short stories, Ulloliyai Thedi and a novelette, Velvi.

His untimely demise in 1999 is considered a huge loss to the Tamil society in Singapore and around the world.