Sunday, May 20, 2012

Octogenarians walk down memory lane


C Shivakumar
Chennai:
It was a rare reunion after more than 60 years for the octogenerarians of College of Engineering in Guindy as they celebrated the Genesis Day with the release of ‘Memoirs of Octogenarian Alumni’.

The nostalgic octogenarians, who passed out of the college in the years 1943 to 1953, shared their youthful days after listening to the address by one of their alumni Sakthi group chairman N Mahalingam.

Consulting engineer and past president R Ramasamy, who was the brain behind this reunion, said the present volume has memoirs of 105 octogenarian alumni, who graduated in the years 143 to 1953. They also include the father of white revolution Verghese Kurien, former under-secretary  General of United Nations (HABITAT) Arcot Ramachandran, educationist and IIT Kanpur board of governors chairman Anand Krishnan and advisor to water resources to Tamil Nadu government A Mohanakrishnan.

The reminiscences and advice to posterity written by most alumni are worth reading, he said.

Surprisngly, the octogenarians have not only been making news in the field of engineering, they are also in news for making a mark in activities which don’t relate to engineering and the memoirs captures it all.

Among those include B D Ardhanareeswaran, rechristened Swami Ishwarananda Giri, head of Samvit Sadhanayana Mutt in Mount Abu. “He is unlike today’s Swamis and his slate is clean,” says Ramaswamy jokingly. The aluni also has a film personality in actor director producer M Balaiah, who won Telegu award for his contributions to the field.

 The others include K Thiagarajan, who is president’s Tamara Pathra Awardee for self made industrialist, K shivaprasad who got patent for a new technology for conversion of municipal waste to energy.

After the first memoir was published in 2006, the second volume could not be published in 2011 as association could not get memoirs from alumni in a sizable mannaer, said M Sekar, dean of College of engineering. “It was published only after Ramasamy came forward to take this responsibility of collecting further memoirs,” he added.

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