New friends from an old school

In the year 2012, my college will be completing fifty years. To mark the occasion the alumni fraternity that is still actively involved with the school, mainly several professors, came up with the idea of celebrating all year long with various events and exhibitions. They soon realised that this is the ideal time to get 50 years worth of alumni re-connected and actively involved once again.

The major part of the brainstorming and weekly meeting for this is gathering steam on campus in Ahmedabad, and through several back and forth emails they urged all of us to connect with other alumni in our respective cities and meet up. Someone flew down from Ahmedabad last week to whip us all into action and so the first meeting happened at last. I never realised that there are twenty architects here who have all passed out of CEPT. There was a thirty year range from the oldest to the youngest present that day. We got so excited that we decided to meet again this week.

As expected, a lot of busy architects couldn't make it. Still there were eight of us, and we spent an enjoyable evening in the verandah of the new Amethyst cafe discussing what our new group could possibly do now that we've discovered each other. Some exciting ideas came up.  I sat through most part of the meeting with my A4 size sketchbook on my lap, sketching quickly, directly with a pen. Suddenly someone mentioned that since I was taking down minutes, I could add something etc..... which was when I had to explain that I wasn't exactly taking down minutes. No one was, everybody was enjoying their coffee and the amiable banter!  I guess we'll have to see whether all this goes somewhere or whether it fizzles out. What usually happens is some initial excitement after which people withdraw into their routines again. Lets hope we take this forward.