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Rupee symbol maker has DMK background

Statesman News Service
Chennai, 16 July: The man who designed the award winning insignia for the rupees actually hails from a family attached to the DMK, a party actually known for its pro-Tamil tilt or anti-Hindi agitation in the 60s and 70s.
Mr D Udaya kumar, presently working as assistant professor in IIT-Guwahati, and who came up with the design is the son of Mr N Dharmalingam, a former DMK MLA, who is a native of Marur in Villupuram district in North Tamil Nadu.
The family presently stays in Thondiarpet in North Chennai where Udaya Kumar grew up. Kumar had earlier passed out of Chennai’s Anna University with a top rank in architecture and has always been known for his bent on art.
The insignia he designed is a combination of Devanagiri script and Roman letter “R” combining both Rupee and rupiya as pronounced in present Hindi.
He did post-graduate studies from IIT-Bombay, which made the media term him as a “Mumbai boy,” a matter that irritated his mother to no end.
“They keep saying Mumbai based boy and even spell his name as Uday. It is terrible,” his mother Mrs Jayalakshmi said. His father says that his son also has a Phd thesis on evolution of Tamil typography.
Udaya Kumar however is busy, joining duty in Guwahati today, for a new course introduced in design in that institution.