Honoring an achiever

"Your work in the areas of information technology and operations management services in the nonprofit and financial services fields has certainly merited this award. We at the Pratt Institute are proud of you,” wrote Thomas F. Schutte, president of New York’s Pratt Institute, a leading engineering college in the US, to Homi Ratanshaw Cooper. Cooper was conferred the Pratt Institute’s prestigious Alumni Achievement Award during a luncheon ceremony on the campus, notes an email from the family. Each year the Institute’s board of trustees, faculty and administration honor alumni nominated by their schools for exceptional achievements after graduation. "Competition is very strong as professional level achievements of graduates from diverse fields are considered,” according to an Institute source quoted in India Abroad.

The Alumni Achievement Award: Schutte presenting Cooper

Cooper is said to be a senior director of a technology solutions team with a major financial institution. With more than 30 years’ experience in the financial services industry where he has introduced several innovative and leading edge technologies, Cooper specializes in post merger operations, information technology and operations management. His services have extended to the city, state and federal governments, apart from the private sector, notes the journal.

On the social service front, Cooper is president and CEO of Sweekar Rehabilitation International, a non-profit organization that works for the education, development and treatment of mentally challenged children in Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh, states the write-up.

An electrical engineering graduate from Bombay’s Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, Cooper received his masters from the Pratt Institute in 1973. A happy memory is that of the Pratt Institute’s computers – "a very rare thing for the times.” He attributes this rare high tech facility at that time to the institution’s connection to Pratt and Whitney, the celebrated makers of aircraft engines. Cooper’s work experience includes managing franchise operations and stints as CEO for Trans America Business Systems and Nirvana International Corporation which imported telecommunications connectors for a manufacturing corporation in India. Reminiscing with India Abroad he noted that he had landed in the US with $400 and a friend’s address in his pocket in 1971. "It was frightening,” he had recalled. Now said to be worth several million dollars, he lives with his wife Kashmira, a former beauty queen from Hyderabad, in Flushing, New York.