SPCE alumni meet.. trip down memory lane.. Part Two !!!

As mentioned in my previous post, here is the balance part of the post on the SPCE Alumni get-together, though quite a bit late.. :(

After the walk down memory lane through the college campus that got me all nostalgic, it was time for the evening programme to start. On the dias were the current principals of SPCE and SPIT and the other office bearers of the alumni association. Currently, Dr. PH Sawant from Civil Engg dept. is the SPCE Principal. I do not recollect him from our days, so must have joined recently. Dr. Prachi Gharpure (looking lovely as always) is the Principal of the unaided wing. For my Mech classmates, our Prof. A V Bhonsale (Engineering Controls anyone ?) is now the HOD of Mech department as also the Vice-Principal. Apart from these, the only other profs. whom I knew that day were Dr. Shubha Pandit (HOD-Elect) and, of course, the tireless and good-ol Prof. VD Raul. In charge of the alumni network, the man's energy is amazing. During the course of the evening, it was revealed that Prof. Raul has tried to kickstart the Alumni network movement thrice so far. The first two times (in the 1990s) it died a natural death but with the latest attempt having started in 2005 (the Annual Alumni meet started in 2005) and still continuing, hopefully it will be third time lucky for Prof. Raul and the Alumni office-bearers.

Coming to the audience, there were, quiet dissapointingly, only about 100 odd alumni who turned up. A huge chunk of them, of course, were from the 1986 batch who were celebrating the silver jubilee reunion. The joy on their faces as they met old batchmates and came back to their alma mater was something to savour. It was also heartening to see Sh Kothare from the 1967 batch show up !!!.. (Must have been the second batch out of campus). But apart from these, the turn out was quite low. In fact, there was not a single person there whom I knew or recognized, which would mean that possibly none from the 1999 to 2002 batch was present :(. As the speeches and the felicitations were going on, I chanced to see a copy of DISHA 2010 and spent good time browsing through it. It provided a good overview of the college activities and was especially heartening to see the strides we have made on the sports field. In fact, SPCE now boasts of a women's basketball team (can you believe that ?) plus other traditional sports like volleyball, football etc. In addition, we already have a alumni who has played for India U-19 in cricket. In Saurabh Netravalkar, we might see a future Indian cricketer from SPCE. All the very best to him !!. Interestingly, there is a now a system of a joint General Secretary, with one representative each from SPCE and SPIT jointly handling the post. Wonder how they work together !! :) After the function was over, it was time to chit-chat over dinner, which rounded off a nice evening.

Before I finish, a word about the enthu for the event. Quite shocking to see only about 100 of the 5000+ (and that is a conversative figure) alumni show up. In fact, one of the key discussion points which I had with the office-bearers during dinner was how to fix this low turnout. For starters, alumni could all register at the Alumni website i.e. http://alumni.spce.ac.in/. This would be a useful starting step whereby atleast our contact details would get recorded in the alumni database and thus, we would get intimations regarding future events conducted by SPCE-AA. I am glad to find 7 others from our Mech-Class of 2000 already registered there, but more are definitely needed. The Alumni Association is also present on Twitter (@spceaa), though not very active. Hopefully that will change soon as more of us follow and interact regularly with the alumni association on Twitter. Small steps like these would help increase the awareness levels regarding the alumni network, which is so vitally important for the growth and development of the institution. Would urge all SPCE/SPIT alumni reading this to not only register on the alumni website but also to share this with their classmates. In 2012, SPCE's 50th year, it is the least we can do to kickstart the process of having a vibrant alumni network.

Hope to see more of you around at the next alumni reunion in January 2013.

Till then...

Cheers

Amit

SPCE alumni meet.. trip down memory lane.. Part One !!!

Last weekend (on the 7th to be precise) gave me an opportunity to visit my Engineering college i.e. Sardar Patel College of Engineering (or SPCE for short). For the uninitiated, SPCE, which is celebrating its 50th year in 2012, is one of the premier engineering colleges in Mumbai University. In fact, it has recently received autonomy status. Living in Mumbai and just a couple of stations away from Andheri, where SPCE is, I am guilty, and rightfully so, of not visting the college more often. The one occasion that presents itself is the annual alumni meet of the college, that generally happens on the second weekend of every new year. The alumni meet started in 2004 and I have attended it a couple of times so far. But have missed it, mostly due to my own laziness, the past couple of years. So this year, when the e-mail from the indefatigable Shashikant Banka from the SPCE Alumni Association landed in my inbox, I knew I had to go. Even though a post on Facebook (to check if any of my friends were interested in tagging along) failed to get a positive response, I then decided to do it alone.

Now since the best way of reviving past memories is to actually relive them, I decided to take the train and walk from Andheri station. The road from Andheri station to SPCE, of course, has changed beyond recognition over the past decade. The pillars of the still under-construction Metro line stand right in the middle of the road, which is now partially closed to traffic. Quite different from our days when a simple walk on that road in the evenings was maddening with the terrible honking of buses and auto-rickshaws around and the ever-growing numbers of pedestrians. Of course, some old landmarks are there e.g. Navrang theater (which I best remember when our Mech class, then in 3rd year, had gone to watch a supposedly soft-porn movie and came back bitterly let-down ;-). These, and other thoughts, kept flooding in my mind as I neared the Bhavan's campus. Outside the campus, Shetty's Chinese is still around and so is our dear ol' Gupta ji (albeit in a completely renovated form: It is also called differently, forgot the name though). Unfortunately, I did not see him around that day. But opposite to them is the Vrindavan restaurent, opened probably 2-3 years ago. The usual all-cuisine Udipi restaurent, the food tastes great (they had provided the dinner at the alumni meet). But I guess the current batches, which might be used to Vrindavan, might not fully understand the importance of Guptaji and Shetty's in those four years :). I then entered the Bhavans campus, which also looks different from a decade back. The road from the entrance to SPCE is nicely paved now. SP Jain has a well-maintained garden in front of it and the temple in the campus also looks more impressive. But one thing that has still not changed is the typical odour of birdshit that hits you when you near the SPCE building :). Especially, going at the time when I did i.e. just after sunset, the odour is just too strong to ignore. It was the same in 2000, it is the same in 2012 as well !! :)

Finally entered the SPCE building at around 6.45pm. The registration for the function was actually only till 6.30pm but I discovered that not too many people were around and the official part of the meet was some time away from starting. After a couple of cups of coffee and some chit-chat, I set out to re-discover the SPCE building. And the thing that struck me was that the basic building has not changed one bit over the past 12 years of so. Of course, most would know that the non-aided branches (i.e. Comps, Electronics, IT and the recently started Electronics and Telecom) have now been spun off into a new college i.e. Sardar Patel Instititute of Technology (SPIT) few years back and which houses itself in a brand-new building behind the SPCE building. Thankfully, the alumni meet was for both SPCE and SPIT !. As I roamed the workshop (looking much the same only with a few offices newly added at the rear end) and the main building, the memories kept on coming. The two walls at the main staircase reminded me of SPACE 1999 where we had put together a huge full-scale painting as part of the decorations. The various notice boards displayed the latest goings-on in the college, including an offer to students of the Akash tablet for around 1200 bucks !!. The quadrangle has been converted into a mini-auditorium with a steel frame overneath and fans hung from there. Sad to see that playing box cricket will no longer be possible there :). Much of the remaining building is as it is including, I believe, the paint on the exterior, all worn out and in desperate need of a re-coat. Could not get the time to go to the hostel though.

After the tour around college, got back to the quadrangle for the function. Will write about the alumni function itself in a follow-up post. Till then, keep reading and feel free to share it with your other SPCE friends and batchmates.

To be continued...

Cheers

Amit

 

Oh.. the railways.. !!

An article in the Indian Express caught my eye yesterday. It talked about the Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi seeking government assistance for the cash-strapped railways. Before we dismiss this as another instance of a mismanaged institution asking for bailout from the government and utter the privatization-word, one needs to consider the enormous social importance of the state-owned railways. That the railways are absolutely vital to the nation's all-round growth is undeniable. I, for one, am a big fan of the railways, even given all the dirty compartments, over-crowded stations et al. A train journey is an experience in itself which air travel cannot hope to match. I fondly remember the 24-hr journey from Mumbai to Bangalore nearly a decade ago. As the Udyan Express halted along the way, one was exposed to a microcosm of India with all its varied cultural hues. By contrast, air travel is just so non-happening !.

Now, when one considers the fact that the passenger fares have not been raised for nearly a decade (alteast I cannot remember the last time they were raised), you can only imagine the financial plight of the railways. Populist measures by successive railway ministers have ensured that the revenue stream is reduced to a trickle, when, at the same time, the salaries of the employees (and the railways has over a million and a half on its rolls) increases with successive pay commission implementation. And when someone like a Dinesh Trivedi wants to introduce dynamic pricing in the forthcoming Rail Budget (though it remains to be seen how beneficial it is in a scenario where demand far outstrips the supply), he is scuttled by his own boss and his predeccessor at Rail Bhavan, the honourable Ms. Mamta Banerjee. Its high time that the Government realizes that introducing new superfast Durontos and giving sops to the home state of the Rail minister is not the way of improving its quality of offering. Today, a large proportion of the customer base of the Railways can afford to, and I daresay is willing, to pay extra in return for cleaner stations, tamper-proof reservation system and punctual schedules. The success of IRCTC proves that improvement is very much possible. Hope the Government and Mr. Trivedi rises to the challenge (though with the Congress-TMC relations under strain, it may be a matter of time before Dinesh Trivedi is replaced by another populist politician ! ;-( .  I, for one, would be keenly watching.

- Amit

Welcome 2012... !!

It is the first morning of the new year. In fact, half the day has already past and we are 365.5 days away from the next new year :) And the day is no different from yesterday, as I had mentioned in my earlier post. Sometimes, I find the New Year celebrations a bit over the top. I mean what is so different and special about the 1st of January. Do we suddenly experience a sea-change in us ? Do people suddenly appear different ? What is it about this date that we suddenly become conscious of all the sins that we have been doing in the past ? But then, as they say, if you want to turn over a new leaf (albeit briefly), there has to be a starting point. And therefore, I guess, it does not matter if that starting point is either someone's birthday or a randomly picked date from the calendar like the 1st of January.

So here am I, with this new blog. As I indicated earlier, this is just a cosmetic change designed to shadow my inherent laziness all throughout last year as far as blogging went. Just six odd posts in the last year was way below par. Anyways, it is time now to look towards the future. One change that would have been immediately noticed is that the title of the blog has now expanded to 'Thoughts along the way... '. Which way, you might ask ? Well, the answer is : I do not know. But what I do know is that I am along a journey, a path that takes me to a destination that I am still not sure of. I will get there one day, of this I am sure of. And this blog is just an opening for all that I think of during this journey. In fact, come to think of it, we all are making or individual journeys. 'Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana...' as Kishore Kumar famously said. Or, a couple of years later, in a mood considerably more melancholy, Kishore Da went 'Zindagi Ke Safar Main Gujar Jaate Ho Makaam..'. The concept of life as a journey has been celebrated since time immemorial. And it is this concept that I seek to discover. To walk along the journey of life, to take the rough with the smooth and to finally keep improving through all that, is what we should all look for.

But thats about it for the gyaan or, more realistic, a manaic typing of thoughts that suddenly shot up in my mind over the past 10 minutes or so. In fact, I have resolved to write most of my posts in not more than 30 minutes. Just allow the thoughts to flow. Of course, the end result might be that you, dear reader, is subjected to quite some thrash. But then, I think, it is worth experimenting.

So till my first real post...
Cheers
Amit