Mani is a writer and scientist whose main claim to fame is being named as the wrong answer to a 2.5 million-rupee question posed by a Bollywood megastar on India's version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. He has published 7 books (two of which have been translated into Japanese) and over 90 peer-reviewed technical papers and according to Google Scholar, has more than 10,000 citations and an h-index of 44. His scholarly work covers areas of natural language processing and artificial intelligence and has been applied to aspects of information retrieval and biotechnology. He has in addition published on literary theory and narratology across cultures. He has served on the Editorial Board of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Engineering. He is also the author of a novel, short stories and travelogues, and his travels have been featured in Rolf Potts' Vagabonding and in Digital Nomad (English and Italian).
Mani has been a Principal Scientist (Senior Director) at Yahoo Labs, Head of R&D at Summly Ltd., a Visiting Fellow at the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, a Research Scholar in Computer Science at Brandeis University, a (tenured) Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, a Senior Principal Scientist at The MITRE Corporation, a (pro bono) Research Affiliate at CSAIL at MIT, and a Member of the Technical Staff at The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation and at Texas Instruments.
He was educated at St. Thomas' Prep School, St. Joseph's College, The Doon School, St. Stephen's College, University of Sussex, University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. He also studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania (with Nora Magid and Carlos Fuentes), at Bread Loaf (with Patricia Hampl), and at Harvard (with Paul Harding).
Mani's origins are somewhat obscure, but what is certain is that he is a Dravidian who is at least 90% South Asian, with paternal Y-haplogroup L-M27 (> 48K years, common in India, Sri Lanka, and Lebanon) and maternal mtDNA haplogroup HV (> 35K years, Eurasian). About 2.6% of his DNA comes from art-loving Neanderthals. His FOXP2 gene, shared with many other species, is partly responsible for his fondness for smatterings of Āṅglabhāṣā (English), Hindī, Drāviḍabhāṣā (Tamil), Saṃskṛtaṁ (Sanskrit), Phrencbhāṣā (French), Śyāmadeśabhāṣā (Thai), and Sūryamūlīyabhāṣā (Japanese). If he could roll back time, he would love to meet his paternal ancestor, the literary scholar and minister Neelakanta Dikshitar (1580-1644). But he also feels a strange kinship with many other ancestral cousins of the nth degree, including classical writers from far-flung regions of the ancient world. Among his favorite books is The Golden Ass by the Berber author Apuleius of Madaura (124-170).