#FakeIndian vs #RealIndian: Shiva Ayyadurai Gets Set To Battle Senator Elizabeth Warren

Indian-origin innovator-entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai is preparing to challenge Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren for her Massachusetts seat in a high-profile Senate race in 2018.

Ayyadurai is credited with inventing, besides the email (a claim contested vehemently by many), life-improving creations such as EchoMail and Systems Health. He is now the chairman and chief executive officer of CytoSolve Inc, which says it has “developed the world’s first computational platform for scalable integration of molecular pathway models”.

The 53-year-old entrepreneur, who cast his first ever vote for Donald Trump (he had never registered to vote until last year), said he did that because he “saw Trump as a necessary force to disrupt a broken system that was no longer serving the American people”.

Ayyadurai saw Trump’s victory as ushering real change, and said his victory was “bound to occur… You can’t get away with fooling people over and over again. The truth is what intellectual and Hollywood elites are upset at … [It] is not Trump, but that they lost control over everyday people, who they discounted as inferior – a lower caste.”

The Indian-born Fulbright scholar, who holds multiple degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fields of computer science and engineering, had announced his plans to run against the Massachusetts Democratic party heavyweight through a tweet on the auspicious Hindu festival of Shivratri.

Ayyadurai said “people are tired of this partisan nonsense and elitism”, and politicians like Warren have “no idea that governance is about solving complex systems problems”.

Calling himself an “embodiment of the American dream”, he said, “Massachusetts ignited the American Revolution. Now, we need to fight for the American dream. That victory will only be possible if we dialogue and educate each other to solve problems, together, as Americans.”

As someone who believes in creating tangible solutions to real problems, Ayyadurai says, “Engineering is about finding solutions with a commitment to ongoing refinement.”

In 2007, Ayyadurai was the recipient of a Fulbright US Student Program grant to study the integration of Siddha, a system of traditional medicine developed in South India, with modern systems biology. He authored an acclaimed paper, titled ‘The Control Systems Engineering Foundation of Traditional Indian Medicine: The Rosetta Stone for Siddha and Ayurveda’, which attempted to validate the scientific foundation of Ayurveda and Siddha.

In addition to his tweet on Shivratri, Ayyadurai recently fired yet another salvo at Warren by sending her a DNA kit – to test her heritage. Warren is often accused of making up her Native American antecedents in order to gain a career advantage. Trump had mocked her during the 2016 election campaign, calling her “Pocahontas”.