Rest In Peace, Zoyd

A few days back, I had blogged about doing my little bit for Sintel. During the entire week, I had been talking a lot with Zoyd on IRC, who had suggested the idea of getting Indian language subtitles done for the movie. He helped me get going and guided me through the entire process. These were perhaps the longest conversations I have ever had with him. At other times, it was just a daily ‘Hi’ between the near-bot nicks on #pluggies (on Freenode). Unfortunately, these were also the last. Yesterday, he passed away in a fatal road accident in Pune.

We were not close friends, and crossed paths mostly during the conferences. Heck, I never could remember his real name (Vinay Pawar), beyond Zoyd. It was the close acquaintance of the past few days that heightened the sorrow of his passing away and completely shook me up when I heard the news. He had been working with Open Source animation tools and seemed to be enjoying it. A shame to lose a potential rockstar in the making. Probably, more than the person, I’ll surely miss the IRC nick that exchanged greetings with me everyday.

I hope you find happiness wherever you are now, Zoyd. You’ll be missed here.