1997 Picnic of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter

the IIT Bombay Alumni Association

by Dushyant Pandya

The Bay Area Chapter of IITBAA organized a day picnic at the Huddardt Park on October 4th, an event that was attended by about 50 alumni. This site will soon have photographs from the picnic that show what a rousing success it was.

It was a potluck picnic and we ran out of the food but Hari Narayanan, the handsome smashing model for Toshiba, saved the day by bringing additional food at last moment. Madan Avadhani was the most cursed man at the picnic. He was supposed to bring the plates and drinks by 12:00. Instead he shows up at 2:00 p.m. Imagine the sight of 50 to 60 hungry people waiting for the food. Then rubbed salt on the wound by shamelessly collecting $10 from all the alumni to defray the cost of organizing the picnic. However, due to his heroic effort we have broken even for once.

Ashok Raman, on the other hand, the lovable guy that he is , had brought his camping stove and made chai for all of us. Subhash Tantry of IIT Bombay Heritage made a succinct speech eliciting the purpose and the benefit of the Heritage Fund. I was the next speaker, and was on a roll thanking the volunteers for organizing the picnic when Hemendra Godbole (Dabba) (H4 EE, '85) cut me short by reminding me to not let the speeches degenerate into a mutual admiration society.

Many thanks to Allwyn Sequerira and his daughters for providing us the entertainment. The number of alumni from Hostel 4 amazed us. Almost 30% of the attendees were from Hostel 4. We expect higher participation from the other hostels in future, especially Hostel 3. We had a very wide spectrum in terms of year of graduation from the respected (Vibhu Shah and Vijay Grover of Class of '69) to bachchas (Moses Charikar and Rohit Negi of Class of '95).

We hope that all of you who attended met people from the glorious past with whom you had lost the touch. We encourage you to stay in touch and make sure that there are at least 100 alumni at the next event. The next event will be held in early spring 1998. In the mean time, if you are in the Bay Area, you can still stay in touch by attending the monthly luncheon on the first Friday of every month. Please contact hmehta[!]equator.com if you are intersted in attending the luncheon.

Lessons learned from picnic:

1. Never have the picnic from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. Kevin Nazareth was the first one to show up at 10:20 am. But he had to leave soon for dragon boat racing. He did come back late in the evening again after the remarkable achievement of not capsizing. Rahul Shah was the last one to show up at 6:00 pm. Most of the people showed up around lunch time. We will organize the next picnic from 3:00 p.m onwards with the option for overnight camping.
2. Truth in advertising: We had touted the picnic advertising that Prof. Phatak, Dean of Resouce Planning, will attend the picnic. I do not know how many alumni came to the picnic wanting to meet Dr Phatak. He never showed up for the picnic and we are left with the dread of a law suit for false advertising.

I would like to thank Ashok Raman, Pushkar Hingwe, Sudeep Kumar and even Madan Avadhani for organizing the picnic. (I love you, Dabba).