Sennaporatti Sivashankar Viswanath Iyer was born in India. He studied medicine at Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute and qualified MB,BS in 1963. Initially he worked as a general surgeon and passed his MS in 1970. He was a lecturer in surgery at Mysore Medical College from 1971 to the end of 1972. In February 1973 he travelled to the UK and began his training in orthopaedics. He passed the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1975 and the college fellowship the following year. Following what he described as a *tortuous route*, he worked at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, the Hammersmith Hospital, the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital and the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh doing various locum posts. In 1994 he was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon at King George Hospital in Ilford and finally he became consultant at St George’s Hospital in Tooting. Throughout his career he very much enjoyed teaching, especially his work on the inaugural *Training the trainers* course in Edinburgh. When young he was a keen sportsman and excelled in cricket, badminton and table tennis. He described himself as a very aggressive batsman and, when he came to the UK, played cricket for a local first division team from 1973 to 1981. In table tennis he also reached a reasonably high standard. He died on 23 July 2020.