Amalorpavanathan Yagulasamy

I live in South Carolina and work in software delivery — Technical Manager at Protech Solutions, where I have spent twenty-five years. I write in Tamil and English. Those two things have less distance between them than they look.

The work

Before 2000, I worked in India on projects for the National Informatics Centre (NIC), as well as in the forex, airline ticketing, and housing loan domains, including work for Indian Oil Corporation. Since 2000, I have worked on child support systems for Michigan, Arkansas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Delaware, along with projects for the Arkansas Department of Finance and the Special Education Department. I currently work on the South Carolina Child Support system, developing software to CMMI-level standards.

In 2005, I received the Microsoft Community Star (MCS) award for my extensive contributions to the .NET community since 2002. My certifications include MCP, Microsoft Azure AI, PMI-ACP and Project Management Level 2 from Midlands Technical College.

In 2015 we started a project that three large companies had attempted over twenty-five years and not finished. We delivered it in three, and it went into service in 2018; several hundred thousand children in South Carolina pass through it each year. We did not succeed because we were cleverer. We succeeded because we built it in cycles — a working piece at a time, a look back at the end of each one, and then the next piece. The companies before us had tried to do it all at once.

In 2025 Protech celebrated thirty years in business and ten years of SC PACSS. For the occasion I said what I still believe: “My 25 years with Protech show that smart and hard work, driven by a service mindset, will always bring us success.” (Celebrating 30 years of innovation and 10 years of success with SC PACSS, Protech Solutions.)

The writing

The Puthukural came first, and is still going: 550 couplets so far across three volumes, in the two-line form Valluvar left us. Two lines is a hard discipline. An idea that cannot survive being said twice, briefly, was probably not an idea.

Nila Nalam came out of being ill. In 2010, in my thirties, a test found my blood sugar high; I have taken tablets for it ever since. Later there were two years of one specialist treating my skin and another treating my blood, each of them good at their own part and neither of them looking at the whole of me. That was the lesson: the only person who can see the whole of my body is me.

So I read — Gandhi on the five elements, Nammalvar on treating illness as the body cleaning itself, Jeyamohan, B. M. Hegde, Mark Hyman, Andreas Moritz — and I kept notes on what I actually tried. My brother died of a brain haemorrhage in 2021 and my father of cancer in 2024, and the notes stopped being a habit and became a book.

What tied it together was the thing from work. Health advice fails the way big projects fail: it demands everything at once, and one bad day feels like the end. A cycle has no such thing as failure — every point on a circle comes round again. So the book is built as a thirty-day cycle, measured by the moon because the moon needs no calendar app, with a look back at the end of each one.

Plainly

I am not a doctor and not a nutritionist. I am a patient who went looking for the root of an illness and wrote down what he found. Everything in Nila Nalam was tested on my own body over more than ten years, which is a sample of one. Your heredity, your work, your season and the weight on your mind are all different from mine. Talk to your own doctor before you change anything.

Shorter pieces go on my Tamil blog, தஞ்சை நாடோடி. If you try any of this and something happens — good or bad — I would like to hear about it. Write to me.