On a leafy, residential street in East Abhiramapuram, in a prettily remodelled house, there's a rather special synergy developing. The first official IIT Alumni Club has just got off the ground there, and all signs indicate it will become a unique space for socialising, networking, and brainstorming, IIT-style.
I drop by one afternoon to find a boisterous lunch under way at the club's sunny restaurant. A group of 10 members (most of them CEOs and similarly high-powered folks) eventually sit down with me in the conference room upstairs, and there's plenty of good-natured ribbing and inter-IIT jokes going around (it turns out that there are representatives from most of the IITs).
“This might be a small, 5,000 sq ft start, but it's an important one, and our vision is big,” says Chand Das, one of the members, as we get down to business. “We plan to eventually have a network of clubs across India and in places such as Silicon Valley and Singapore with a large number of IIT alumni.”
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Modelled on the lines of the high-profile clubs of Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale, the club is meant to be a central point for alumni from all the IITs to meet and interface informally. With its restaurant, gym and other facilities, and its cheerful, sleekly modern décor, the club is an inviting, chilled-out space, but its members are very clear that this is more than just a social hub or an ‘old boys club'.
“Naturally, PanIIT's (the umbrella organisation for IIT alumni) nation-building projects will get support here,” says Deepak Mirza, president of the club. “Plus, we've already signed an MOU with the IIT-Madras Research Park to encourage alumni to use the facilities there. And we've started discussing sensitive issues such as suicide on IIT campuses, and what alumni can do to help students cope with the real world.”
The club had its ‘soft launch' in October last year, and has been functional since January 2011. But the idea of such a club has been around a lot longer, stretching back to the mid-90s at IIT-Madras.
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“We had planned to have an IIT Madras-specific club on the campus — we'd even laid a foundation stone for it — but some issues came up and it fell through,” says K. N. Satyanarayana, member of the club, and an IIT-Madras professor. “The idea was revived again during the PanIIT Global Conference 2008 in Chennai; that was really the trigger.”
Three months of meetings at Gandhi Nagar Club later, the idea once again seemed to be in danger of dying a premature death. But this time, it was the IIT-Madras Alumni Association that came to the rescue. “The association had several pro-club members, and they decided to do something pan-IIT,” recalls Mirza. “By July 2009, they'd restarted activity on the club, and pretty soon we had 200 people aboard.”
Club members are already planning ‘Phase Two', where they will acquire land (the current property is leased) and move to a larger premises, with extended facilities, in the next couple of years. “Other city alumni clubs will probably go directly to Phase Two since they have a model that works,” says Mirza. “Delhi already has a club committee in place, and Bangalore has got going as well.”
It hasn't been an easy ride (“we all lost an average of 7 kg — and we haven't even started using the gym yet,” jokes Mirza), but it's been worth it. “Being the first IIT Alumni Club in the world is definitely something special,” says Das.
Club Profile
* No. of members: 300
* Fifty per cent are at the vice-president level and above
* Many are IIT faculty members
Future plans:
* To add 200 more members in the next two years
* To have more younger members