Sansmriti'09 - A life time experience

As it spent two and a half years at UIET, on some 28^th feb 2008, an idea struck in my mind, that why don’t we have an alumni meet in our college. Suddenly I found myself planning for everything. Next night I wrote mails to seniors to fetch the current status of their batch mates. I got enthusiastic responses the same night. On 3^rd of march I started up with midsems of 6^th sem. She was in the same moment, as I told the idea to my friend Deepika, A final year student at UIET.

As we explored the things we got to know that a teacher in the college, also the alumnus and she did make some efforts towards it. We talked Director Sir, and before we could have understood anything, I felt people around less enthusiastic.

As I analyzed I got to know that they were not agree over one thing that –  the money that will be donated by alumni will go into University’s account in place of it being a separate account of UIET.

I came up with certain ideas but it was impossible to implement them without having alumni team with me/us.

In nut shell the idea swept away slowly, I got busy with other things; also I lost enthusiasm to fight back for I did not find an anchor to support me back.

Anyways, gradually a year spent by.

It was spandan’09 scheduled on 26-29 march. And along with it, Organizing team planned for Sansmriti- alumni meet.

Sandeep arya, a final year student also the member of organizing team contacted to Gagan Deep, my branch mate. And consequently I was contacted and thus I was in the team (they did not know that I previously made efforts for meet.)

Now we were a small team with two of us only with a lots of things to be done, as sandeep was busy with spandan stuff.

The biggest hurdle was where to start with.

The tasks we were upto –

• Collecting all email addresses of seniors.
• Sending them invitations
• Confirming their arrival
• Hospitality – making arrangements for the stay of our guests
• Getting good coordinators and volunteers
• Invitation to faculty, Director, VC etc
• Finalizing the schedule
• Deciding and ordering for mementoes
• Writing applications for taking permissions for almost everything and get them all signed up by Director Sir

And plenty of other things like posters, decoration etc etc which sound of negligible importance but took most of our time and energy. because we were inexperienced people, generating everything from scratch.

Ample of ‘not-to-happen’ things happened. (We will talk about them in next post.), but still we continued…….

It became 28^th march 2009, and finally clock struck 10:00 am. None appeared except the team. All my volunteers and coordinator members were on time.

 The first one to appear was Mr. Manish Dua, 97 batch, Then HODs and faculty-organizing team members.

No more alumni turned up yet, and the clock was strucking 10:30 am. We started getting panicky. But fortunately at 10:50 am nearly 8-10 alumni turned up. The first task then was getting the alumni information filled up, and providing them the entry cards. We were through with this formality soon and then we proceeded towards Director’s office.

From there we had to go to Center of Academics, a grand and beautiful building, where our meeting with Vice Chancellor Dr. Harsh Sehgal was scheduled.

Nearly 25-30 people, including 6-8 coordinators were there in the CoA. The meeting was unexpectedly successful. 

At times we got to see the things which filled us with the fascination of being the alumni of the institute some day.

All the alumni we received for the event were quite impressive, must say Handsome too (as the institute is just 10+ years old) and also well established in  this short period of time, unexpected once again.

To the alumni they seemed happy seeing the improvements in the college, new infrastructure etc, and above all their batch mates and juniors. We all were eager to know each other and to share our experiences, even talking/ gossiping.

With in seconds we got intimate academically, say it seniors, juniors, faculty, audience every one of the participants.

 Lunch, Interaction, meeting with coordinators, memento distribution ceremony, dinner everything went really cool, unexpectedly very smooth.

And how can I forget telling you amazing performances given by three of our seniors, Kshitiz,Vishal and Amit sir.

It was a complete 12 hours (10am-10pm) alumni meet. I was there managing things yet I gotta enough time to have words with seniors. The event was completely fascinating, involving, amazing and all in all it was a brand new experience.

Plenty of fruitful outcomes we got, benefiting juniors and college, but above all meeting the great products of our college filled all UIETians with joy.

Even before the meeting was over I started receiving the congratulation messages from juniors, batch mates even from Director Sir and few of the faculty panel.

 At night I reached home nearly t 10:15 pm. All my family members were waiting me eagerly to listen the whole event, despite from the truth that I was running short of energy, I decided to talk to them, (I did not want to let them down), But when I started talking ,,,,,,, I kept talking for 2 hours.

Finally I came to my bedroom at 12:30 am. Unable to sleep, I had been analyzing the whole event, the mistakes that were committed by team and by individuals, about the coordinators who should inherit the things for next year.

I looked at watch, It was striking 1:00 am. Dried mouth, I felt tired like anything. I had been sleeping only four-five hours since last 5-6 days. And hell I found that I was starving too. I got to remember that I did not take enough food neither in lunch nor at dinner , at lunch I was busy managing the next thing and at dinner I was in hurry to reach home, also too tired to eat. And while mom asked for dinner, I refused saying that I am done.

Now 2:00 am, yet no sleep.

3:00 am, still .. no sleep, only thoughts and I was famished.

Finally I knocked the door, and went in to kitchen, cooked poha for myself and ate it in peace and tranquility of night. Now I though I would sleep. But It took another hour to make me sleep.

Well, I awoke next morning at 9:00 am. J

So this was all 28^th march 2009 for me, the most awaited date since last one month.

At last I must thank all team members who made this experience worth remembering –

Sandeep, GaganDeep, Bhaskar, Diwakar, Ashutosh Rashmi, Divya, Varun, Abhinav, Anupama, Nikhil, Somyajeet, Shadab, Sandeep(junior), shakti…and all other friends, faculty members, Director sir, audience, and all alumni. (also my enthusiasm which kept increasing through out the process :P LOL)