IN MEMORIAM: DEEPAK KAPUR
Deepak Kapur passed away on April 11, 2026. He had served as a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico since 1998, Deepak was a prominent member of the diasporic Indian left in the United States, and served as the first President of the SINGH Foundation. Below, we present some memories of Deepak from Vinod Mubayi. A memorial page on Deepak has been set up at https://singhfoundation.org/dkapur.html. His colleagues at UNM note that “he is remembered by friends and colleagues for an illustrious career in teaching and a deep intellectual curiosity that motivated him until the end.”
Vinod’s message: Deepak and I had known each other for 50 years ever since we met in Cambridge, MA in early 1975 when Deepak was pursuing his PhD in computer science at MIT. We became good friends very quickly after since we shared many social and political views about democratic rights, secularism, opposition to communal politics based on religious identity, and peace and good relations between South Asian countries especially India and Pakistan. I don’t remember now but it was perhaps Deepak who introduced me to some MIT students from Pakistan: Pervez Hoodbhoy, Arvind Khilnani, and Waqar Zakaria, are the names I remember now, (especially as Pervez and Arvind have remained good friends until now and were very upset to hear about Deepak’s untimely passing). All of us discovered our common perspectives and we soon formed the Group of Concerned South Asians (GOCSA) to promote friendship between students and academics from India and Pakistan in the Greater Boston area. A few months after GOCSA, the Indian Peoples’ Association in North America (IPANA) was formed in June 1975 in Montreal. I probably introduced Deepak to IPANA after returning to Cambridge from attending the founding meeting of IPANA in Montreal in June 1975. If memory serves me right, Deepak, Sekhar and I formed the core group that mainly wrote and produced the monthly India Now tabloid-style newspaper as an IPANA publication for a few years. Deepak also helped in creating and serving on the board of the SINGH Foundation that took its name from our late friend R.P. Singh who passed away at an early age from cancer.
As we belonged to different academic domains, my interaction with Deepak was limited to social and political issues where we had common interests and concerns. However, Deepak was an internationally distinguished scientist in his field of computational mathematics.
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