The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur is mourning the death of "distinguished achiever" and alumni GV Loganathan, the professor who died in a US university shootout along with 32 others.
Loganathan, who had done his masters from IIT Kanpur after graduation from IIT-Madras, is credited with linking the IIT Alumni Centre here to the Virginia Tech's engineering education department on certain projects.
"We held a condolence meeting on the campus in Kanpur on Tuesday evening," IIT director Sanjay Dhande said on Wednesday.
The alumni association observed a two-minute silence as a mark of homage to the departed soul, while his contemporaries paid rich tributes to him.
Describing Loganathan as a "distinguished achiever" in the field of civil and environmental engineering, Dhande said: "It was very agonising to conceive what happened in Virginia, where I used to teach before coming here in 2001."
Rating Virginia Tech as among the "leading academic centres in America", he said: "I cannot even imagine in my wildest dreams that a student of such a place could take to such wild behaviour."
He suspects that the free availability of weapons in the US could be responsible for the killing.
{{/usCountry}}He suspects that the free availability of weapons in the US could be responsible for the killing.
{{/usCountry}}"The high standards at Virginia do keep scholars on heir toes in an academically tense environment in which today's short-tempered generation was more prone to taking law into their own hands.
"And what could have tempted the killer more easily was easy access to a gun," he added.
"After all, this was not the first incident of its type in the US. There have been a few more such indiscriminate killings carried out by trigger-happy psychopaths there," he said.