CHENNAI : It was a reunion after more than 60 years for the octogenerarians of the College of Engineering in Guindy as they celebrated 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 memories of their youthful days after listening to an address by one of the alumni, Sakthi Group chairman N Mahalingam.Consulting engineer and past president R Ramasamy, who was the brain behind this reunion, said the present volume had memoirs of 105 octogenarian alumni. They include the father of the white revolution Verghese Kurien, former under secretary-general of the United Nations (HABITAT) Arcot Ramachandran, educationist and IIT Kanpur board of governors chairman Anand Ramachandran and adviser on water resources to Tamil Nadu government A Mohanakrishnan.The octogenarians have not only made a mark in the field of engineering, they are also in the news for activities unrelated to engineering and the memoirs capture it all. B D Ardhanareeswaran, rechristened Swami Ishwarananda Giri, is head of Samvit Sadhanayana Mutt in Mount Abu. “He is unlike today’s swamis and his slate is clean,” says Ramaswamy jokingly. Film personality, actor-director-producer M Balaiah, won the Telugu award for his contribution to the field. K Thiagarajan won the President’s Tamara Pathra Award for self-made industrialist and K Shivaprasad got a patent for a new technology for conversion of municipal waste to energy.The first memoir was published in 2006, and it took till 2011 to get enough alumni memoirs together for the second volume, said M Sekar, Dean of the College of Engineering. “It was published only after Ramasamy came forward to take the responsibility of collecting memoirs,” he said. Mannar Jawahar V-C of Anna University was present on the occasion.
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