Nayak was named after Swami Vivekananda. He has stated that seeing his father's business premises being repossessed by the bank and his father buying a lottery ticket on the advice of an astrologer to pay off the loan with the total confidence that it would get the first prize made him turn to rationalism. He married Asha Nayak, a lawyer in Mangaluru in a non-religious ceremony. Nayak started out working as a lecturer in the Department of biochemistry in the Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore in 1978. In 1982, he met Basava Premanand, a notable rationalist from Kerala, and was influenced by him.
Activism
Nayak decided to take on full-time anti-superstition activism in 2004 when he heard that a girl had been sacrificed in Gulbarga in Karnataka. He was an assistant professor of biochemistry when he took voluntary retirement on 25 November 2006, after working there for 28 years. Before the general election in 2009, Nayak laid an open challenge to any soothsayer to answer 25 questions correctly about the forthcoming elections. The prize was set at . About 450 responses were mailed to him, but none were found to be correct. The Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations has been conducting such challenges since 1991. During May 2013 Karnataka state assembly election, disappointed at the challenge being one-sided, Nayak had decided against the idea of challenging astrologers this time. But when a Bengaluru-based astrologer Shankar Hegde made claims to predict the election results accurately, he received the challenge. Nayak offered to hand over a cheque of Rs.10 lakh, if 19 out of the 20 results were proven right. However, later on astrologer Hegde did not turn up. Through the organisation named Aid Without Religion which was registered in July 2011, he has been helping people and institutions where there are no religious rituals, superstitious practices, unscientific systems of medicine and such supernatural beliefs. The registration was done at Rahu Kalam, a time of the day which is the most inauspicious - so it was a double rather a triple whammy, a Saturday, new moon day that too in the month of Ati which is considered to be the most unlucky time and at Rahu Kalam! He has been featured on National Geographic's television showIs it real?. He has also appeared on the Discovery Channel. He has been a regular columnist at the newspaper Mangalore Today since its inception. He also serves on the editorial board of the Folks Magazine. He has admitted to have been attacked for his activism a few times. He also has stated that his scooter's brake wires were once found severed, after an astrologer predicted his death or injury. He was also involved in fighting against Midbrain activation, an alleged modern technique that enables students to see objects despite being blindfolded.
Views
Nayak advocates that more people should be taught to perform the so-called miracles of godmen. He also advocates that people should be trained to recognize pseudoscience and demand scientific evidence. He holds the opinion that well-known scientists should be convinced to join the cause and form pressure groups against pseudoscience. He is also lobbying for a bill for the separation of state and religion to be introduced in the Indian parliament. After the murder of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar and enactment of the anti-superstition ordinance in Maharashtra state, Nayak expressed the need of a similar law in Karnataka.
