Twenty nine years
ago many stars aligned and a bunch of us come into IIT Kanpur together. We came from all parts of India with
immensely diverse backgrounds -- united only by our intelligence and by our
aspirations to create great lives for us and those around us. In the beginning we bonded naturally and
comfortably with people who were assigned rooms around us -- our wing-mates. We
mostly accepted each other as ourselves and sowed the seeds of some of our best
friendships in life.
At IITK, we went
through 4 of our most formative years of life -- we all turned from adolescents
to adults while here. We sometimes thrived and sometimes struggled with
academics and extra-curricular activities -- but one important thing that we
all did was we created bonds and memories!
We left our college,
ready to take on the world, vowing to stay in touch with our best friends.
Over the years, we
scaled all kinds of mountains in our
lives -- one higher than the other. We built families, we built homes, and we
all built super-successful lives. And we stayed in touch with some of our
friends over the years.
Then came the 25th
year reunion -- where those bonds and memories were reignited! We all converged
on the campus with a little apprehension and much excitement. We felt
butterflies in our stomachs as we first sighted the IITk campus. Nostalgia took over when we saw the familiar
roads and buildings. Not much looks to have changed, we realized, as we started
recognizing the comfortable landmarks and well-trodden paths.
Then we started
meeting our friends and batchmates! We shrieked in excitement as we met friends
we made 25 years ago, but had not seen since then. We gave puzzled looks to
people who we could barely recognize. We pondered over how some people managed
to look exactly the same after that many years. Apprehension gave way to
comfortable familiarity -- you were still welcomed and accepted into the tribe
even after all the time that had passed.
We all took
nostalgic tours of the campus, we visited the buildings where we attended our
classes or worked on our projects. We tried to re-live our college days through
extended "bulla" sessions or by visiting our favorite haunts at the
odd hours of yesteryears --Lala's canteen at 2:30am. We met current IITK
students and we gave them our words of wisdom about life.
Some of us decided
to pull together an impromptu band with some guitars, keyboards, and a drum
set. We played a set with some of our favorite IITK songs of those days -- such
as Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb or Pyaar Hamen Kis Mod Pe from the movie Satte
pe Satta. The non-band members among us visited the memory lane by
participating in the singing and
thoroughly encouraging the band. All of us really enjoyed Rajesh Nigam's
amazing extempore performance to cap off one of the most amazing evening of our
lives!
While the place that
brought us together was IIT Kanpur and the time was late 1980's, it felt that
forces larger than ourselves brought us together. At the end of the day, the
reunion was less about the place and time but was almost entirely about people
and about memories of an awesome part of our lives spent with those people.
And, the people who could not make it to
reunion were sorely missed.
At the end of 3
days, we all left feeling much enhanced about our bonds with our tribe. We all
left with a renewed appreciation of the place that brought us together. We all
left richer with memories of the event that we will cherish for many years to
come.
P.s. Thanks to Tarun
Bhargava, Naveen Prakash, Jai Rawat, the IITK Alumni Association and many
others who helped put this amazing event together.
