In Memoriam: Padmakar Joshi (1937-2025)
March 07, 2025
Good afternoon,
My name is Om Joshi and I am the grandson of Padmakar Joshi. I knew him as Ajoba, which is the Marathi word for grandfather. When I was a child, he lived in Boston, so we would also call him “Boston Ajoba,” which he found endearing and cute. He moved from Boston to San Antonio in 2011, which means he was actually in San Antonio for most of my life. Nevertheless, the nickname stuck, and I still sometimes instinctually refer to him as “Boston Ajoba.”
In honor of Boston Ajoba, I wanted to share some memorable anecdotes of how he shaped my childhood and career aspirations and how much he means to me. By coincidence, all of the things I chose start with the letter B.
Blackboard
One place where Ajoba had an impact on my childhood and future career was at the blackboard. I was getting proficient at my multiplication tables, and he decided it was time to start teaching me some basic algebra. We used to have an easel blackboard and chalk in the playroom. So we would sit down together at the blackboard, and he would write an algebraic equation on the board and ask me to solve for X.
He taught me to isolate the variable by sending terms involving X and constants to opposite sides of the equation. He always made sure I did things methodically: I would go term by term, simplifying the expression and showing my work at each step. As time progressed, we also began working on how to move terms around in my head.
At that age, learning algebra was just another fun opportunity to spend time with Ajoba, but it turns out that all the skills that Ajoba taught me are exactly the same ones I use on a daily basis. I’m confident that a big reason I enjoy math and science nowadays is that I associate algebra with all the happy memories of sitting with Ajoba at the blackboard.
Baseball
Ajoba was a lifelong fan of the Red Sox, Boston’s professional baseball team. He almost always had a baseball game playing on his TV. As an impressionable five-year-old in 2007, when the Sox won the World Series, I naturally gravitated towards his rooting interests. This sparked an obsession with baseball that included me collecting several hundred baseball trading cards, playing in the local Little League, reading books on the history of the Red Sox and advanced baseball analytics, and watching lots of baseball on TV myself. Now that I’m the Bostonian of the family, I have more opportunities to carry on his legacy of being a Red Sox fan.
After Ajoba moved to San Antonio, he would sometimes drive me to after-school baseball games, often with a stop at Chipotle on the way. I also fondly remember playing baseball with him in the backyard. Doing the math, he would have been at least 70 years old at the time, and he was still out there chasing me around the diamond.
Breadboards and Batteries
Ajoba had a passion for electronics and was successful in passing this interest along to me. I remember several trips to RadioShack over the years. He bought me my first multimeter when I was quite young, and he also bought me a soldering iron and breadboard so we could work on basic electronics projects together.
Ajoba was deeply involved in several scientific and engineering projects I pursued over the years. For my third grade science fair project, I compared the performance of different brands of batteries in their ability to drive a simple motorized car and power a lightbulb. This project involved some basic soldering, so Ajoba taught me how to use a soldering iron to connect the leads of the motor to the battery holder.
In the experimental procedure of my science fair report, I wrote, “I released the car and said ‘go’, my grandfather said ‘stop’ when it crossed the end line, my father kept time with the stopwatch, and my sister brought the car back to the start line.” I believe Ajoba is listed on my poster as a coauthor or in the acknowledgements. He was definitely the chief engineer of the project as well.
He also helped me assemble and test a mechanical robot arm. This project required a lot more soldering, so he supervised me and kept an eye out to make sure I was doing everything safely.
There were a bunch of times in my undergraduate electrical engineering degree that I needed to solder things, and I thought it was neat that my grandfather had already taught me that skill. I’m now in a research area where we sometimes make our own electronics for experimental equipment, and I’m proud to be following in Ajoba’s footsteps.
Bridge
Somewhere along the line, Ajoba also introduced Seva and me to bridge, the card game. For some reason, I always associate playing bridge with being in my pajamas, so I think this usually happened when he was babysitting the two of us at night. Despite it being a bit nonsensical to play bridge with three players, he patiently taught us about the order of suits and how bidding worked and would walk us through each hand. There was often a bridge puzzle in the daily newspaper, and we would read those together as well. I’m not sure how much bridge he had played in the past, or how interested he was in the game itself, but he was certainly committed to making sure we felt included and had fun and learned something new.
Conclusion
The common theme to all these stories is that Ajoba really enjoyed spending time with us. He was so thoughtful and patient when teaching us and never found it to be a chore or annoyance. He found everything that Seva and I did to be cute and would often express how much he appreciated us and how proud of us he was. I’m going to miss him very much. I will celebrate his legacy by continuing to root for the Red Sox, solving more equations and puzzles, and being adventuresome in undertaking new electronics projects. I hope to carry on his spirit by showing a constant love for and dedication to my family.
Thank you.