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When I ask Rahul Dhinakaran to introduce himself, he dives right in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI design machines. I build machines,\u201d he says without hesitation. \u201cI\u2019m a tinkerer, if you can call it that.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I ask him to tell me more about his life outside of work \u2013 who he is when he\u2019s not an engineer \u2013 he\u2019s stumped.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s tough,\u201d he laughs, \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this for two decades.\u201d But he eventually told me about his family and son, who shares his love for motorsports. Rahul\u2019s passion for machines was, in fact, nurtured by a family member, but one from an earlier generation.\u00a0Though he wasn\u2019t an engineer, Rahul tells me that his grandfather had a natural sense for, and love of, mechanisms and machines.<\/p>\n
When Rahul was only four or five years old, his grandfather took him to railway stations to observe steam locomotives. They lived in Madurai, a small ancient town in the South of India that hosted one of only four or five steam engine maintenance sheds in the country.<\/p>\n
Rahul remembers watching the complex engineering that allowed the turntable to slowly rotate the locomotives, as well as the steam turbine at the textile mill where his grandfather and father worked. His grandfather also taught him about internal combustion engines, and explained how scooters and motorcycles worked.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rahul\u2019s childhood fascination naturally progressed to studying mechanical engineering at university, even though his education in machines had clearly begun much earlier. Afterwards, he worked in motorsports. And it was during his apprenticeship in motorsports that one of his colleagues traveled to the US for a car styling course, and came back with a compact disk labeled \u201cSOLIDWORKS\u201d in black marker.<\/p>\n It was 2003.\u00a0At university, Rahul used a very complex modeling software, which discouraged him from pursuing a career in design.<\/p>\n \u201cI was actually very scared to get into design because of it,\u201d he admits. But everything changed when he discovered SOLIDWORKS.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a breath of fresh air,\u201d Rahul says. He explains how arduous it was to model any object with the software he\u2019d been using previously. \u201cBut in SOLIDWORKS you could just click on that box, and drag it like that\u2026\u201d He mimics the simple movement for me with a slow hand gesture, his gaze almost dreamy as he recounts it. \u201cI still remember it, twenty years later. It was what convinced me that I could have a career in design.\u201d<\/p>\n Rahul hasn\u2019t used another software since, and he\u2019s had a long career. He left motorsports and started his own design company, where he designed and built everything from suspension systems to pick-and-place robots to medical vessels for companies all over the world. He eventually moved to design consulting to make more time for his family.<\/p>\n Some of his machines still harken back to the technologies that captured his childhood imagination. For example, he tells me that once he incorporated a component that functions like the connecting arm that existed in steam locomotives.<\/p>\n \u201cI was thinking, why did I do that?\u201d he laughs, \u201cand then I remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2024\/10\/madurai_s20railway20station20today.jpg\")
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