40th Foundation Day and Distinguished Alumnus Awards Ceremony
IIT Bombay celebrated its 40th Foundation Day on 10th March, 1999. Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Director, BARC Mumbai delivering the Foundation Day Lecture spoke on "Nuclear Tests at Pokhran". Dr. Kakodkar was speaking for the first time on this topic at any forum. He gave a summary of the 1998 nuclear tests pertaining to all technical aspects and the yields registered.
The lecture was preceded by the ceremony of the presentation of the Distinguished Alumnus Awards. This year, the Awards were given to eight alumni who had achieved exceptional excellence in their professional life. They are :
Except Dr. Sastry and Dr. Ravindran Kannan, the other six awardees attended the awards ceremony. The memento consisting of a golden spiral sculpture, was presented to the awardees by Chief Guest Dr. Kakodkar and the citation scrolls were presented by Director Prof. S.P.Sukhatme. Earlier, welcoming the guests, Prof. Sukhatme remarked that IITs have made satisfactory progress in these 40 years maintaining academic excellence and lately, gaining recognition for its research activities.
Prof. Sahasrabudhe, Dy. director and chairperson of the Awards Committee said that among the many exceptional recommendations they had received from departments, centres as well as from alumni themselves, it had not been an easy task to select the "specially" exceptional alumni for the awards this year.
The Foundation Day ceremonies concluded with a concert of instrumental music consisting of a jugalbandi between Smt. Kala Ramnath on violin and Sri Rupak Kulkarni on Flute, accompanied by Sri Yogesh Samsi on Tabla.
Crossroads, the students career festival was held on 13th and 14th March, 1999. It was attended not only by most IITians but also by many students of Mumbai and places like Pune, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Aurangabad etc.Around 2000 students participated in the two day long event.
The events which took place during this festival were as follows:
Six teams reached the finals where they made presentations of their business plans (which included marketing plan, financial analysis, strategic motives etc) in front of the judges. The team from Aurangabad took away the top honour.
Sponsors for the event were:
Title sponsor; Amazon.com; Co-sponsor, Aptech Ltd, Event Sponsors were A T & T and Verifone. Prizes were sponsored by Microsoft Corporation, and Press sponsorers were Express Computers (Indian Express).
The 18th Deepak K. Merchant Memorial Lecture was delivered on 19th March, 1999 by Prof. Prem Vrat, Dy Director (Faculty) and Professor, Industrial Engg. & Management, Dept. of Mechanical Engg., IIT Delhi.
Prof. Vrat spoke on the topic "Quality Management in India - Problems, opportunities and Challenges". Presenting India's ranking (50th out of 53 countries) in the 1998 Report of the World Economic Forum, he emphasised that "the lack of quality dimension in our thinking is one of the most important reasons for our depressing level of global competitiveness". He reviewed some of the concepts related to TQM and outlined the challenges facing managers in the Indian context Mapping Indian quality initiative in quality grid, he concluded that Indian management is not committed to quality, but gives more of a lip service.
Following are some extracts from Prof. Vrat's lecture:
"Indian business houses are hyper actively treating the symptoms without finding the real cause of the problem. TQM cannot be achieved by merely lip service to it or by plastering offices, board room by vocal commitment to the cause. TQM can &127;nly be achieved by implementing TQM programmes sincerely".
"Most of our quality programs are piecemeal efforts - quick fixes - not directed at fundamental problems. The quick-fix mentality also makes our system blind. To facilitate effective change, competitive excellence and performance improvement are the need of the hour. These changes in turn require redefining the roles and behaviour of the management by personal transformation and inculcating system thinking and improving culture as a whole". Dr. W. Edwards Deming said, "nothing happens without personal transformation".
"An analysis of countries who have achieved commanding heights in quality improvement reveals that their emphasis has been on more important but less urgent issues. In our country today, we are still ignoring the challenges ahead and fighting the crisis due to emphasis on urgent and important issues rather than leading the organisations to greater heights by concentrating on more important but less urgent issues which alone provides long term sustained quality improvements". (Lecture copy available at PPR Section)
Sundial
The concluding programme of Project Solar Eclipse 99 called Sundial, was held at IDC on 19th March, 1999. The presentation was made by Dr. Ajanta Sen Pooviah, Project coordinator of Project Solar Eclipse in India. The project Sundial event commenced on 12th March, 1999. School children and design students from U.K. (Falmouth College of Arts) and India (Industrial Design Centre, IITB) collaborated via the computing and networking technologies (internet, FAX, phone, email) to exchange ideas about the sundial and come up with concepts and designs to be translated into actual sundials.
Out of the week long interaction, seven designs of sundials emerged from design students, of which 3 have been made into prototypes - sundial using mirrors, an umbrella with an antenna showing GMT & IST and another using water acting as lense using "light" instead of "shadow" to show time. IDC students were guided by Prof. Bapat. The children made 18 sundial modes out of cardboard and other material. A similar effort has been made at the U.K. end.
The earlier events of Project Solar Eclipse'99 were Collaborative Mural, Interactive Festival (virtual holi) and collaborative sculpture.
Rahul Kopikare (Swimming Secretary), an EE student of IIT
represented IIT Bombay in 5 k.m. Sea Race (Sunk Rock to Gateway of India) which was conducted by Maharashtra State Amature Aquatic Association on 3rd March 1999 ( see the report here)and did IIT proud by winning trophy in men's category second time in a row. In fact IIT performed a hat-trick by winning the trophy for the third consecutive year (Milind Kopikare 1997, Rahul Kopikare 1998, & 99). The other swimmers of the club were Vishakha Naik (1st in under 13 yrs.) and Pankaja Date (5th in under 13 yrs.).A paper entitled "Design and Analysis of a new membrane based blood oxygenator" won the first prize at the National Technical Paper Presentation Contest of the `The Chemical Engineering Association' of the Manipal Institute of Technology (in association with the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers).Its authors were Sumit Mehra (who presented the paper), Kasiram K. and Prof. Jayesh Bellare.
Shri Sujay Sanghvi, a student of third year B.Tech., Dept. of Electrical Engg., was awarded the second prize in the Student Paper Contest organised by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Bombay Section on 20th March, 1999. The topic was on `Wavelet based neural networks applied to speech processing'.
Dr. Shyam R. Asolekar, C.E.S.E.
delivered an invited lecture entitled "Systems Analysis for Strategic Environmental Assessment and Planning" in the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur on 9th February, 1999.Prof. M.N. Mathur, Retd. Prof., Dept. of Mathematics gave an invited talk entitled "Fundamental Equations of Continuum Mechanics" at the Department of Mathematics, University of Jodhpur, Rajasthan on 11th February, 1999.
Dr. P. Selvam, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry delivered lectures on the following topics at the University of Mumbai on the 1st, 6th and 8th March, 1999 for the "UGC Sponsored Refresher Course in Physical Chemistry for College Teachers:
Prof.M.C.Srisailam was the Chief Guest at the inaguaral function in a Continuing Education Programme on Microprocessors organised by Thadoomal Sahani College of Engineering on 11th March 1999. He also gave a keynote talk on this occasion.
Advanced Lecture Series
Professor D.N. Verma, TIFR, Mumbai delivered a lecture on "Lie Theory and Representations of Classical Groups - II" on 12th March, 1999. at the Dept. of Mathematics. Prof. Verma also delivered lectures on the Subtopics `Binary Invariant Theory' and `Beginning Lie Theory proper' on 19th, 22nd and 26 March, 1999.
Invited Talk
A Talk cum Open-Floor Discussion oni "Challenges and Opportunities in Nuclear Engineering Research and related areas" was led by Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Director, BARC on 25th March, 1999. The talk was organised by Research Scholars Forum. Prof. S.C. Sahasrabudhe, Deputy Director presided over the programme.
Maths Dept. Popular Lectures
Prof. Shiva Shankar, Elec. Engg. Dept. delivered a lecture on "Mechanics as Geometry" on 26th March, 1999.
Industrial Design Centre
A Lecture was delivered by Philip Jones Griffiths, one of this century's master photographer, on 24th March, 1999 which was followed by an introduction to an ongoing documentary of his works "A Millennial Documentary". This documentary reflects Philip Griffiths career and also his humanitarian view of the world.
Dr. G. Descotesi
delivered a lecture on "Sucrochemistry: past, present and future" on 3rd March, 1999.Prof. Hans Jorgen Schneider,University of Saarland delivered a lecture on "Molecular Recognition Mechanisms from Ionophores to Nucleic Acids" on 5th March, 1999.
Dr. Sumio Iijima, Director, Fundamental Research Division NEC, Tskuba, Japan and JST/ICORP & Meijo University delivered a lecture on "Carbon Nonotubes: Past, Present and Future" on 8th March, 1999.
Prof. L.F. Tieze, Director, Institute of Organic Chemistry, Gottingen, Germany delivered a lecture on "Domino Reactions in Organic Synthesis" on 15th March, 1999.
Dr. Abhijit Sarkar, Tohoku University, Japan delivered a lecture on "Design and preparation of Polydiacetylenes: Towards better third order nonlinear optical materials" on 26th March, 1999.
Mr. Shekhar Borkar,
Intel Corp. delivered a lecture on "VLSI Technology Trends and Microprocessor Design Challenges" on 4th March, 1999.Professor Vidar Thomee,
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden delivered a lecture on "Maximum-Norm Estimates for Parabolic Finite Element Equations" on 8th March, 1999.Prof. O. Moeschlin, Fern Universitat, Germany delivered a lecture on "Control of Traffic Light" on 19th March, 1999.
Prof. Jacques Lemordant, University of Grenoble, France delivered a lecture on "Java in Scientific Computing: From Techniques to Concepts" on 25th March, 1999.
Dr. Ravi Raghunathan, TIFR, Bombay delivered a lecture on "Introduction to Arithmetic Dirichlet Series Converse Theorems for Dirichlet Series" on 31st March, 1999.
Dr. G. Subrahmanyam
, Associate Professor,Biotechnology Centre, delivered a lecture on "Phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase: A role in T-cell activation" on 9th March, 1999.Prof. S.Durani, Convener, Biotechnology Centre delivered a lecture on "From creation to design. Awaiting the second breakthrough" on 16th March, 1999.
Prof. S. M. Sonar, Asstt. Professor, Biotechnology Centre delivered a lecture on "Spectroscopic ruler by expanding genetic code" on 23rd March, 1999>
Prof. G.V. Dass
Department of Physics, IIT Bombay delivered a lecture on "An elementary Introduction to the Physics behind Discovery of Direct CP-Violation" on 10th March, 1999.Sudipta Maiti Chemical Physics Group, TIFR delivered a lecture on "Nonlinear Optics for Biology, Improving Microscopy with Femto Second Lasers" on 19th March, 1999.
Dr. Priyadarshini Karve,
Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI), Pune delivered a lecture on "Initiatives in Appropriate Technologies for Wood and Biomass Production and Utilisation" on 15th March, 1999.Prof. S. Pradeep,
Dept of Aerospace Engg, IISC delivered the following talks:A Science Club has been active in our institute since last semester- the activities include talks by students (called Conjunctions), lectures by scientists from in and around Bombay, Workshops and demonstrations in Astronomy, Aeromodelling and HAM, etc.
On 6th March, 1999, the Science Club had organised a talk by Dr C.S. Unnikrishnan, TIFR entitled `Probing gravity, particle physics and quantum vacuum with torsion balances'.
Budget'99 - A Panel Discussion
The students of School of Management organised a Panel Discussion on " Analysis of Indian Union Budget" on 6th March, 1999 at the Lecture Theatre.
The distinguished speakers who participated were Prof. Kirit Parikh, Director, IGIDR, Mr. K.K. Nohria, MD, Crompton Greaves, Mr. Shailesh Haribhakti, CA & Tax Consultant, Mr. Ajit Sanghavi, Director, Malini Sanghvi Securities Ltd., Mr. G. Sunderraman, VP (Purchase), Godrej-GE Appliances Ltd.
Prof. B. S. Jagadish Memorial Trust and IIT Bombay Students' Gymkhan
a presented Carnatic Vocal Recital on 23rd March, 1999 by Smt. Kiranavali Vidyashankar, Disciple of Chitraveena Ravikiran, and grand-daughter of Gotuvadyam Narayana Iyengar with Shri R. Madhavan on the violin, and Shri Rajesh Srinivasan on the mridangam.The restoration of the Devi Temple begun on 1st October, 1998 was completed during last month. On 21st February, 1999, the auspicious Foundation Day of the Ganesh Temple, the recently constructed Shell Roof Temple Sabha Mandapam was inaugurated by H.H. Swami Chidananda, present Acharya-incharge of Sandeepany Sadhanalai, Powai. L&T, (ECC) had not only completed the Sabha Mandap but also given a proper facelift for the whole temple complex. After the 30th Annual Lecture of Swamiji, a Kuchipudi Dance was performed by Smt. Padma Tatapady (of California).
Shri C.C. Edwin
Assistant Engineer (SG) has been appointed as Executive Engineer (Civil) Construction Division, Estate Office from 2nd February, 1998.Compiled by Aruna Thosar-Dixit ... edited by Ms Suranga Date ... re-edited by Ram Kelkar
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