When I was asked to write an article to welcome the students and alumni of IITB the inaugural article of SARC’s blog, the first thing that came to my mind was this theory I had a couple of years back before I got a chance to interact with IITB’s alumni. I logically classified alumni into three categories The famous ones, The start up ones and The others.
The famous ones: These are the ones that have Wikipedia pages of their own. Those who have built imposing structures across the campus. The likes of Nandan Nilekani, Kanwal Rekhi and Girish Gaitonde who are frequently mentioned right from the numerous freshman orientations to the convocations!
The start up ones: Though technically an alumnus, he is just one of those 24 year old seniors who has a start up in Mumbai and comes regularly to pain sophies in his wing to download the latest sitcoms, movies and other stuff into his external hard disk! They somehow don’t quite fit the picture of alumni because for most of us they are just “seniors”.
The others: You take away the first two demographics from the alumni pool, you are left with “The Others” – grey haired people in powerful, respectable positions in industry and academia across the world. People who probably have kids of our age. We rarely get to see them or hear about them!
When I attended the Golden Jubilee Event, Kal aaj aur Kal in March 2009 organized by the Alumni Association in Bangalore, my itinerary for the event was to hang out with people 20 or 25 years older than me! I mentally prepared myself for boredom. Not just ordinary boredom but discussing-MA103-quiz-paper-in-the-tut kind of boredom!
Twenty minutes into the event, I realized that I was completely wrong about my expectations from the event. True, a lot of them may be as old as our parents but the specialty of a student-alumni conversation is that the alumnus is always in a “student” mode irrespective of his/her age. The first alumnus I met at the event was from the batch of 1982 who is now the director of a supply-chain management company in Bangalore. The first thing he said to me was, “Hey, don’t call me sir. I am your senior, 25 years senior but still, we don’t address seniors as sir in IITB!” Needless to say, I responded with “Yes, Sir.. er.. sorry oops… (with a colon capital D smile)”
As the conversation moved on from small talk to the more “important” issues, I found myself talking about all aspects of current IIT life answering questions ranging from “Is Prof. so-and-so still around?” to “Is the girls scene any better or are the non-males still lurking at 5% of the population?” et cetera etc.
Slowly he switched gears to a nostalgic mood where he fondly recollected the fierce rivalry between hostels competing for GC and now-lost traditions like hostel picnics – a grand event where the entire hostel hires a few buses to go for a trek (or a night out at the beach). Apparently, it was customary to make one round inside the insti stopping near the gates of rival hostels and shouting slogans like “H4 ki maa ka…“ and the other usual slogans in front of H10 and H11!
The conversation lasted for about ten minutes but it was enough to see how ridiculous my Alumni Classification Theory was! In a way, this is what this blog aims to achieve. To act as a platform capable of changing your perceptions without compromising on the fun factor. To enable students and alumni to have meaningful conversations about issues that matter and those that don’t. To mark the beginning of a new dimension in student-alumni interactions at a level unseen in any other institute or university in Asia (We wanted to verify the claim but we couldn’t understand the blogs of Chinese and Japanese Universities, so like all other student organizations in IITB, we’re proclaiming this to be the largest of its kind in Asia :p)
In the last one and a half years of interacting alumni, I have had conversations as serious as passionate debates on HRD ministry’s Policies regarding IITs to learning silly trivia like the number of hyderabadi-reddy-gultis-from-Ramaiah in the batch of ’98 (ans: 27)! I hope this blog will contain conversations across the spectrum that help students realize that alumni irrespective of what generation they belong to, are just like our hostel and department seniors!
I want to end this post with this profound quote by an alumnus of Chem Dept. (batch of ’82) – “yaar 22 saal se chemical industry mein kaam kar rha hoon, par aaj tak ye nahi chamka saala ki woh thermodynamics ka course humne kyun padha!”