Na Govindasamy (18 April 1946 – 26 May 1999) was a Singaporean educator, writer and an Internet researcher. Govindasamy was a lecturer at the

National Institute of Education The National Institute of Education (NIE) is an autonomous institute of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Ranked 12th in the world and 2nd in Asia by the QS World University Rankings in the subject of Education in 2015, the ...

, who worked to develop the

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

16 bit

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

system which uses Tamilnet and Tamilfix fonts and enables a user to input Tamil in all three computer platforms -

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, Mac and

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

. These fonts enable a user to read emails and web pages in

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia ** Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nati ...

on a terminal with only a shell account. Amongst his other achievements, Govindasamy contributed to the development of Tamil literature in Singapore. He made significant contributions, specifically the creation of several plays, dramas and short stories for radio and television. Among the plays, two proved to be very popular, namely ''Anbukku Apaal'' and ''Alaigal Oyvathillai''. He also published a collection of short stories entitled ''Thedi'', for which he received the National Book Development Council’s award in 1992. In 1977 in Singapore, he initiated the ''Ilakkiya Kalam'' (Literary Critics' Circle) 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 also published a novelette, ''Velvi''. In 1994, he was awarded the

S.E.A. Write Award The S.E.A. Write Award, or Southeast Asian Writers Award, is an award that is presented annually since 1979 to poets and writers of Southeast Asia. The awards are given to the writers from each of the countries that comprise the Association of S ...

. Govindasamy died in 1999.

Awards

* 1994 S.E.A. Write Award

References

External links

One Hundred Tamils of the 20th/21st Centuries
{{DEFAULTSORT:Govindasamy, Naa 1946 births 1999 deaths Academic staff of the National Institute of Education Indian computer programmers S.E.A. Write Award winners Singaporean dramatists and playwrights 20th-century dramatists and playwrights Singaporean people of Tamil descent Singaporean people of Indian descent Singaporean computer programmers