I'm now Dr. Saro Velrajan - What a journey!

I’m happy to share that I've completed my Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at Hindustan University! I finished a journey that I started 4 years and 11 months ago. My research is about "QoS-aware Service Migrations in Multi-Access Edge Computing". I'm thankful to Dr Thangakumar J (my research guide), Dr.V.Ceronmani Sharmila and Dr. Vallikannu Alagappan, who kept me motivated, pushed me to reach newer heights and lent a helping hand whenever I was stuck in the journey. Yesterday (29th Aug 2025), my viva voce was completed. I defended my thesis in front of an expert panel, qualifying to receive the Ph.D degree.

Why did I even sign up for Ph.D?

Let me take you back to the year 2020. I had some spare time during the Covid lockdown, I started writing a few blog posts about 5G. Then I asked myself "You are already known as a blogger. Why not just author a book?". I started authoring a book on 5G networks. It took me nearly 6 months to finish the book and I published the book via Notion Press and Kindle Publishing Platform in July 2020. Little did I knew at that time that the book would be later-on picked by leading universities such as Anna University, Bennett University and Christ University as a text book in their syllabus.

While I published the book, I felt that many authors were "Doctorates" and I didn't have the "Dr." initials. Around the same time, a friend of mine (Dr. Sundararaman Chintamani) completed his Ph.D at the age of 60. I thought age is no barrier to pursuing our academic goals and signed up for the Ph.D program at Hindustan University, Chennai.

The Journey

The initial journey was quite easy... as most tasks were done online. I completed the course work (studied and wrote assignments/exams for 4 subjects) and published my first survey paper in an IEEE conference in the first year.

The journey became difficult after that... finalizing a research topic, getting the research environment ready etc., took a lot of time. I got the idea for my research by attending several online viva voce sessions. One of the researchers had used Particle Swarm Optimization in their research work. Out of curiosity, I read more about PSO... and found that I could do research in Edge Computing using PSO. I learned Python and wrote nearly 2000 lines of Python code to create my simulation environment. That was quite a bit of learning. Once I had the simulation environment ready, then performing the tests, getting the results, benchmarking against other state-of-the-art algorithms became easy.

I published my research articles in journals and conferences, meeting the minimum eligibility requirement (2 journal papers + 2 conference publications) for Ph.D by April 2024. Unfortunately, my guide had to move out of Hindustan University. I was assigned a new guide... as per the "unwritten process", you have to publish a new paper under the guideship of the new guide to complete your Ph.D. It took me another 1 year to get another conference publication under the guideship of the new guide. I completed my synopsis/thesis submission by April 2025. I received the comments from the reviewers in August 2025 and finished my viva voce also in the same month... on the 29th August 2025.

I always tell others that for faster goal achievement, you need to have 3 people - a role model (who has already accomplished the goal), a mentor/guide (who guides you to achieve the goal) and a buddy (who is also pursuing the same journey). My role model for Ph.D was Dr. Sundararaman Chintamani. My mentor/guides were Dr. Thangakumar, Dr. Ceronmani Sharmila and Dr. Vallikannu from Hindustan University. My buddies were Musthafa Sheriff, Jinu Sainudeen and Michael Dinesh. All of these individuals had a direct impact on the successful completion of my Ph.D journey.

The Message

Quite often we sign up for something... but, while we make progress we find obstacles, hardships and challenges along the way. When my heart told "Saro! It's not your cup of tea... just give up and move on", my mind said "Saro! You should be a role model for others.. most importantly, your children. Just hold tight and finish your journey". Whenever I fell down, I jumped back up, dusting off the dirt, pushing myself hard.. almost limping to the finishing line.

Today, it feels as if I moved a mountain. When I reflect upon the journey, I feel that I've now developed more capacity to handle greater challenges. The new "Dr." initials that I've acquired would remind me of the Dream, Drive and Determination !

My sincere thanks to everyone who played their little part in helping me to complete this journey.

Speakers Hive Journey - Blog #2 - From Aim, Aim, Aim to Action

The year 2025 brought several changes into my life. I resumed my participation in Toastmasters meetings, after a gap of nearly 1 year.  I submitted my Ph.D Thesis in the month of April. That was a big relief to me. However, I had not taken any efforts towards starting the speakers forum. 

April got over, May got over, Jun got over... professional commitments became hectic... I thought I will do this once things calm down on the professional front. However, my professional calendar became even packed and I realized that I'm going to be busy till Sep 2025. I told myself that "Let me do this in Oct 2025". Whenever I spoke or met Kavitha Chidambaram, she always enquired "Sir! When are you going to start the forum?", "Sir! If you start it, you will find time to run it Sir... Don't hesitate ... Just start".

Around the same time, I was helping a friend of mine (from HCL days) Ram Swaminathan. He had enrolled in a coaching program and as part of that, he had to coach someone to achieve a goal. I went to him with a long term goal of mine (Suspense for now... not related to Speakers Hub!). He helped me make some progress... however, I hit a wall due to factors beyond my control/influence. He kept telling me... "Whatever you want to achieve in life, you'll have to start somewhere"... "Don't just keep thinking about it... and wishing for it... Just start ... the more actions you take.. the more progress you'll make... you'll move from the zone of unknown to the zone of clarity". While he was coaching me on another goal ... I decided to apply that persuasion... on "Speakers Hub". 

I kept hearing "Just Start... Just Start... " from both Ram and Kavitha.... It became hard for me to ignore the volume of those voices. 

I started floating the idea of Speakers Hub with my mentor from Toastmasters - Lalitha Giridhar. She came onboard and she said "Saro! Let's do it". While looking for a domain, I realized that Speakers Hub is already taken by someone and hence settled for "Speakers Hive" (which is more vibrant and energizing than Speakers Hub). I registered a domain, created a website and finally we launched Speakers Hive on the 11th of July. The arrival of Speakers Hive was communicated through a simple flyer in Facebook and LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming. 

The week that followed was one of the busiest weeks for me. The last time that I was "this" busy was when I was the Division Governor in Toastmasters for the whole of Tamilnadu  in 2011-12 period. After a long gap, I started dealing with a tsunami of volunteers and members who are interested to join the movement - back to back phone calls, Whatsapp getting bombarded with messages. In less than a week, we got 50+ members and 30+ volunteers. Kavitha Chidambaram, Lalitha Giridhar, Sudha Rajesh, Rajesh Natarajan, Rajeev Nambiar, Sidharth MP, Ra. Ma. Palaniappan and several other volunteers signed up to support the movement.

We started planning for our first online meeting on the 20th of July. I had created a Speech Manual with 10 basic speaking projects, a while ago using Gemini Gen AI Service. We decided to start the forum with that. We created role player templates/checklists, we identified a few role players... we trained them and did a dry run with them on 19th of July. I was in-fact traveling for work and was in a place near Mumbai on that day. I participated in the first meeting of Speakers Hive from a hotel room near Mumbai. We had 30+ participants attending our first meeting and it turned out to be a huge success. 

The journey has started... Speakers Hive has grown from a seed to a sapling, from just thoughts to actions. We kicked off Speakers Hive as a truly agile platform.. with the spirit of continuously learning, adapting and evolving. Most importantly, we will have to live up to the trust of the members and volunteers who have enrolled in the program. 

Speakers Hive Journey - Blog #1 - Dreamer or Doer?

A bunch of friends and I recently launched a new initiative called Speakers Hive, a non-profit forum for members to develop their communication and leadership skills. Our focus is to help students and professionals become better speakers and leaders. We intend to have chapters of Speakers Hive, set up in colleges, communities and corporates.

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to share my experiences and learnings from starting this new initiative. We are starting this from ground zero and from a clean slate. So, I am quite confident that we are going to learn a lot of leadership lessons in this journey. I thought it would be worthwhile to capture this journey in my blog - and use this opportunity to revive my blogging habit too. 

A group of friends and I from Toastmasters (Rajeev Nambiar, Sidharth M.P and I) decided to start a program for communications and leadership skills development in October 2020, to help young individuals to become confident speakers and leaders. Sidharth M.P had even taken a stab to come up with some 10 speech projects - to kick start the initiative. We approached an auditor and even submitted some documents for the trust registration with the name of "Speakers Hub". However, like a gushing 'Goli Soda' (a carbonated drink served in a bottle), the initial enthusiasm faded away in a few months. Partly, because I enrolled myself in a part-time Ph.D program and I couldn't allocate time for this initiative beyond work, family and studies. Subsequently, we told the auditor that we are not moving forward with this for now. The initiative went to shelf and got buried there for nearly 5 years. 

I got busy with my technical consulting career at Ginkos India and my Ph.D work. I couldn't think of anything beyond work, family and my Ph.D work for nearly 5 years. In fact, I even deprioritized my favorite Toastmasters program, due to the time needed to complete my Ph.D deliverables. The urge to revive Speakers Hub came in spurts a few times... however, the spirit vanished quickly like passing clouds. I was once invited by Kavitha Chidambaram (a friend of mine) in 2024 to attend one of her Toastmasters club meetings. At the end of the meeting, I told her... "Kavitha! We have a lot of young people in the community with a desperate need to develop their speaking skills. However, due to the high fees of the Toastmasters program, they are not able to get benefitted by the program. We should do something for this". She acknowledged "Yes Saro! We should do something". And, I got into my car and drove back home. The dream of starting a movement, continued to be a dream... and I didn't take any action after that.

Towards the beginning of 2025, when I inched closer to my Ph.D thesis submission... I told myself... this year we should do this for sure. I even wrote in my new year resolution that "Start a forum for communication and leadership skills development". However, I was yet hesitant to launch the forum. I had lots of questions going on in my mind "Will this work?", "Can I dedicate time for this?", "How are we going to develop the curriculum for this program?", "Will I get support from others..."... I kept postponing this initiative. 

In the mean time, Kavitha Chidambaram had gone ahead and launched several initiatives to help little children develop speaking skills in Tamil and English. With the help of volunteers, she was able to help several 100s of students to meet regularly and practise their speaking skills. 

Kavitha invited me for one such meeting happening in a mutual friend's house on a Sunday morning in Feb 2025. I was suprised to see nearly 2 dozen students with parents assembling in a house on a Sunday morning to practise their speakings skills... with lots of enthusiasm. While I went there as a Chief Guest, I felt ashamed that I was talking about a forum like this for years now.. but, have not taken any action. But, Kavitha Chidambaram is able to execute the plan in a few months - with lots of courage and confidence. While stepping out of the meeting, I told Kavitha "Kavitha ! For sure, I'm going to start something like this for adults this year... You can hold me accountable". 

While driving my car back home, I turned on my car radio to listen to some music. However, I could hear my inner voice louder than the radio and hence I couldn't ignore what it said. My inner voice told me "Saro! Actions speak louder than words. Enough of just dreaming, start doing. We have a lot of dreamers in this world. But, there are only a few doers. Do you want to be just a dreamer... or a doer?"