IITK 87 Reunion - Just Nod if You Can Hear Me

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.