Manik Varma is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Microsoft Research India where his primary job is to not come in the way of a team carrying out research on various aspects of machine learning and artificial intelligence. He also specializes in professing random gyan to his PhD students at IIT Delhi. For instance, he once proclaimed 2 KB (RAM) ought to be enough for everybody, prompting the international media to cover his research and compare him to Bill Gates (unfair, Manik’s more handsome!). Similarly, John Langford and Manik once coined the term extreme classification and found that they had inadvertently started a new research area in machine learning. Today, by happenstance, extreme classification is thriving in both academia and industry with Manik’s algorithms making billions of predictions every day and generating billions of dollars in revenue (up to sign ambiguity). Manik has, on occasion, also been known to do something useful such as developing classifiers that have protected hundreds of millions of devices from viruses and malware. He has served as an associate editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TPAMI journal as well as a Senior Area Chair for most of the premiere machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision conferences. Manik has been elected a Fellow of the Indian Academies of Science (IASc, INSA, and NASI), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has also been awarded the Government of India's Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, has won the Microsoft Gold Star and Achievement awards, the WSDM 2019 Best Paper and BuildSys 2019 Best Paper Runner-up Prizes, won the PASCAL VOC Object Detection Challenge at ICCV 2009, and stood first in chicken chess tournaments and Pepsi drinking competitions. Upon learning about this, his son was overheard asking his daughter: How can Dad get a prize for computer science -- he can't even book an Uber by himself? Since then, Manik has felt it safest to describe himself as a failed physicist (BSc St. Stephen's College, David Raja Ram Prize), theoretician (BA Oxford, Rhodes Scholar), engineer (DPhil Oxford, University Scholar), mathematician (MSRI Berkeley, Post-doctoral Fellow), or astronomer (Visiting Miller Professor, UC Berkeley).