NITT1991

When I left REC Trichy in 1991, I had no hope of meeting or talking to many of my batch mates again. Almost half of my batch mates were out of state, some even out of country. Many had plans to go to US for higher studies and others started their career in different parts of the country. So I left REC with a heavy heart.

Those were the days before the internet and email!

During the mid nineties, one of our batch mates Abraham Sudhakar, who was working at Canada at that time for Coral, used this wonderful new medium, email, to link about two dozen of us. He maintained that email list for about three years. That was the first attempt to bring us together, it was very useful. Somehow, Abe disappeared from the radar over time; we are still trying to locate him!

During early 2000s, Raghu Prasad revived that mailing list and kept adding new addresses. The list had more email addresses but not as much email traffic as we hoped. I guess everyone was busy with their nascent families and establishing their career. Still it was very helpful he kept the link alive. Except for that list, some of us were not in touch with even our best friends from college days.

Six month back, one of my batch mates, Ravin red, sent out a funny email about his trip to RECT using that list. A week later, I replied with my own experience of multiple trips I made to RECT over the years. To my frustration, almost a dozen of the three dozen recipient emails were obsolete and bounced back! As our email conversation went back and forth, it became increasingly frustrating to deal with all those bounces. So I decided to clean it up. Once I started the cleanup, I received several lists of unverified emails from others. Painstakingly, I sent individual emails to each, and depending on the response, kept or removed the address from the list. I forwarded the 'clean' list to all the 'clean' ids. I and Raghu agreed to maintain the list clean and up-to-date and actively add new ids. At that time, Sabapathy came up with the idea of a Yahoo group and volunteered to create one for this clean list. The Yahoo group was created on June 3rd, 2005. That was the genesis of this great Yahoo group NITT1991.

In the past 3 months, what started out as an effort to update the email list, turned into a great forum and resulted in a fun filled reunion over the Labor Day weekend. It definitely has been more successful than I thought. Part of the success has to do with the timing. We are all well settled in our career and family life, we are able to spend time for nostalgia. We are all financially secure and looking for ways to enrich our lives. Part of the success is also to do with our relentless effort to make everybody join.

If you are a RECTian (or a NITTwit, since our esteemed institute is NITT now) from the batch of 1991, this is your group, it is not any individuals or few people's, it is everybody's group; you belong here; everybody is on equal footing; feel at home and please click here to join. I personally invite you, each one of the 300+ RECTians from 1991 batch, to join. If you are still hesitating for some reason, please send me an email with your telephone number or email, I will personally call you or email you and address any question or concern you have. BTW, you are part of this batch even if you spent only few semesters with us. Those from batch of 1990 who did few semesters with us and those who moved from REC Srinagar to do few semesters with us and those who started with us in 1987 but did not finish with us in 1991 are all part of this batch; you are all cordially welcome to join.

The forum is not just for nostalgia and fun, it has become a powerful tool for us to network. Most of us have been very successful in our fields, we now have the ability to leverage that. And it is happening; we are able to give each other business leads among other things.

We now have 78 members from US, India, UK, Middle East, Far East and even South Africa. We still have a long way to go (there were 300+ students from our batch). We are actively soliciting others to join. Some of my best friends haven’t joined yet! (Where are you Gurumoorthy, Ramalingam, Sakthiyappan, Bhaskar, Mathimaran, Sukumar, TTP and others?)

The reunion was so much fun; it deserves multiple entries in this space. I will share as much as I can in coming days. The past three months has been a great journey. I am looking forward to reestablish contact with all my batch mates and have many larger reunions.