state of reunion
To the naked eye, reunions are ground for reacquainting - an extra-curricular outing where old boys meet as older men, where backs and bottoms are slapped, campus memories dredged out, old infatuations remembered and nicknames called out. But a degree below the bonhomie, subtler dramas unfold. Gangs regroup and sotto voce evaluations are made. The '70s and '80s alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, did not have that last pleasure at their reunions, given that there were fewer than 10 women in a batch of 300 in those days, and technology had no time for tarts. But that didn't make the reunions any less interesting.
| Reunion Corner | ||
To the naked eye, reunions are ground for reacquainting - an extra-curricular outing where old boys meet as older men, where backs and bottoms are slapped, campus memories dredged out, old infatuations remembered and nicknames called out.
But a degree below the bonhomie, subtler dramas unfold. Gangs regroup and sotto voce evaluations are made. Everyone waits to see how the homecoming queen turned out; if the couple that hooked up in school is still crack-resistant ; if the math whiz found the formula to success; and if the class tramp will even show up.
The '70s and '80s alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, did not have that last pleasure at their reunions, given that there were fewer than 10 women in a batch of 300 in those days, and technology had no time for tarts. But that didn't make the reunions any less interesting. "I always say, the five years at IIT were the best five of my life, and the two days of our reunion were the best two days of my life," says 1982 alumnus Bakul Desai.
Desai, who helped organise the 2007 silver jubilee of his batch, and is currently engaged in planning his Hostel 4 come-together , says the batch reunion is planned a good year ahead, and with the logic typical of an IITian. "We created a mock village called 82 Nagar on the banks of Powai Lake, with installations of atoms and molecules, to suggest bonding," Desai, a resident of Hyderabad, recalls.
The slow scaling of adrenaline was evident from the monthly online updates. While they trawled Google, Facebook and Orkut for old batchmates absent from IIT-Bombay's alumni site, they also employed two other systems to hunt down those the net didn't throw up. "From the IIT office, we got hold of the 25-year-old addresses of batchmates, and circulated them on the grid," Desai explains. Each one then hotfooted to the address nearest him, and knocked on doors to either meet Old Boys in the flesh or have neighbours realign their compass.
A year later, it was a budget of Rs 12 lakh, an allocation of duties and a consensus on the Legacy Project (through which the class of '82 pledged Rs 4 crore for an incentive programme for new faculty members) that finally saw 150 alumni and their families from all over the world converge at Powai Lake.
... more.
