US Edition 
Did a 14-year-old Indian boy invent email?
Mumbai-born scientist Shiva Ayyadurai launches campaign to persuade public he invented email as a 14-year-old boy in Newark
An Indian-born scientist is waging a campaign for recognition as the 'child inventor' of email.
Shiva Ayyadurai, a 50-year-old United States-based bio-scientist, has published a book challenging claims that the American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson invented email and asserting his own claim as its creator.
According to Mr Ayyadurai, Mr Tomlinson's creation in 1971 was a primitive form of text messaging, while he had invented what we know as email in 1978 when he was a 14-year-old boy helping out the Newark dental school where his mother worked.
His claims have caused outrage throughout the IT world, but he has influential champions in Deepak Chopra, the new age spiritual guru, and India's new prime minister Narendra Modi who has posed for photographs with him. Mr Modi believes many Western inventions, including aircraft, were actually discovered by Indian scientists thousands of years earlier.
Mr Ayyadurai, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, copyrighted the term 'email' in 1982 but did not patent it because, he says, it was not possible to patent software at that time. His creation, however, was an inter-office mail system with an inbox and was called 'email'.
Ray Tomlinson's creation enabled users on different computers connected to the primitive ARPANET, a precursor to the internet, to send messages to each other. It used the @ symbol to identify the computer from which it was being sent.
But according to Mr Ayyadurai, the symbol was all it had in common with the modern email system he created which was designed for office workers to send and receive memos.
In an interview with India's Economic times newspaper, he said he would take his claims "directly to the people" to persuade them rather than technology specialists or take legal action establish his rights.
"In 1978 there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact create the inter-office mail system and called it email. What they did before 1978 was text messaging. The facts are coming out now in 2014", he said.