In 2007, Sridhar got married to Sowmya Gopal, who works as a radar scientist at Intermap Technologies in Munich, Germany. For the past five years, the couple has rendezvoused, mostly on weekends, with Sridhar doing most of the intensive 16-hour roundtrip travelling. With his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Sridhar takes pleasure in the lure of the open road and the couple frequently visit new countries - so far, they have been to more than 15 countries with plans to visit many more in the future. Like many curious travellers, one of the main reasons they came to Europe was the possibility to visit many countries and cultures with a single visa and in a hassle-free manner.
Sridhar was a regular contributor to the UT-Nieuws starting in April 2006, writing about local historical sites, features articles on people in the university community, and often about the growth of his pet charity AADHAAR (Association for the Development of Health and Academic Awareness in Rural India). He is a regular columnist for a website for non-resident Indians, writing on the topic of Indian history and achievements. (www.nriol.com/content/columns/ashok/index.asp)
Apart from his mother tongue Tamil, he speaks fluent English, German, Dutch, basic Hindi, and has started learning Spanish. His long-term goal is to study Sanskrit, the mother language of many Indo-European languages. He is fascinated by history, especially focused on India, Persia and Greece, and plans to switch to historical studies and analyse certain aspects of ancient India, when the time is ripe. He’s inspired by the role of intellectuals and thinkers over many millennia, and the role they play in shaping the world we all live in. His life mantra comes from the Tamil language and translates: ‘What you know is equivalent to a fistful of sand, what you do not know is as big as the size of the universe.’
Today in the Waaier building, before a panel of academics, the researcher will defend his final thesis titled, ‘An inkjet printing-based process chain for conductive structures on printed circuit board materials.’
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| A marriage endures the long-distance: Invited by his supervisor Dr. Durk van Dijk, Ashok Sridhar (right) and his wife Sowmya Gopal take in a Beethoven concert at Enschede’s Music Center, just before leaving the next day to celebrate their 3rd wedding anniversary in Paris. |
