Since the Chennai get together on 23rd Dec, working on the ideas provided by our batchmates in the Trichy & Chennai get togethers and the US East Coast conference call and various one on one phone calls that we have had with each other a core group comrpising Rajeshwar, Saravanan, Sudharsan, Baskar, Boby, Vilva, and me have had several meetings and discussions over the past 4/5 weeks.
Rajeshwar, Vilva, Saravanan, Sudharsan, Bobby & myself met at Rajeshwar’s office on 26th evening to kick start the activities. There were several decisions taken in the meeting. I will summarize major ones:
1. Giving back to the institution: There were several ideas floated in the previous meetings. The team felt there is no point in contributing to infrastructure as the college is well funded. The team felt there is a strong need for improving the students’ employ-ability in terms of communication skills, personality development etc., Some scouting for trainers has been done by Vilva and Rajesh. Some more work needs to be done where short-listed trainers will pitch before us and we may select one. Preliminary budget has been worked out. We are planning to conduct training for 5 years and the cost works out between 8 to 10 lacs per year. Vilva is anchoring this activity and he post a detailed note here the coming week.
2. Channeling the funds: Lot of work has been done by Rajesh and Bobby in this aspect. The team has zeroed in on forming a TRUST viz-a-viz SOCIETY. We have identified a broad based team of TRUSTEES. We have included people from all branches, representation for women & people from different regions. Further paper work and legal aspects are being worked out by Rajesh & Bobby. Rajeshwar will make a detailed post on this this weekend.
3. Regional coordinators: We have identified regional coordinators. Saravanan is the anchor and will communicate with the concerned people. Saravanan will share the details in a post soon.
4. Silver Jubilee celebration: From last year’s expense sheet we find that we need between 8-10 lacs for the function alone. Bulk of the expense is Food (about 3 lacs). The fund for this cannot be channeled through the TRUST that we form to conduct Training of students. We will communicate on this once we are thru with the decision on this. We find that each one of should donate between 8 to 10 thousand for the function. This is only for the celebration part. Apart from this there is a donation that needs to be done to the TRUST for conducting the training programme. There are some high value commitments made by some of our class mates. The estimated budget for Celebration and Trust activities is about 50-60 lacs. Since we are celebrating the 60th year of the institution we are targeting a fancy number of 60 lacs. I sincerely hope and appeal to all mates to voluntarily contribute as much as you can to this noble cause.
I will give more updates in the coming days. Time is running out and we need to gear up. We are humbled by the previous and subsequent batch mates’ energy, enthusiasm and the amount they are targeting. We will all galvanize and show them that we are no inferior in setting standards.
