Reunion Meet

This is a mild account of reunion meet that I figured over phone.


Last night(US time) we spoke to several people while they are gathering in the campus. Some folks hardly slept for couple hours. Rajsekhar(ECE) was driving people crazy. Prasad helped him till 1:30 in the night but at 3:00 in the morning Suman banged his door, time to pickup people from nearby train stations. KK etc arrived early in the morning. Some reached at Ramachandrapuram.


People spoke with high energy. I sampled in the morning afternoon and now in the late evening. Everybody was praising the arrangements. Kudos to all involved. I spoke to some spouses as well- they were very impressed with the close friendship and affection among the group. Moms said it was inspiring to the kids. 


It started with meet and greet at the breakfast. All moved to the assembly tent area and everybody introduced themselves.  Over phone I could hear Suman, Prasad, and Ramesh introductions. The speakers were really loud. Following the introductions there was a long session of group photo. No one wanted to talk to us midst the high energy activity but at my request Ramesh left his phone on. From the tent they walked over the campus to the auditorium where rest of the activities took place. From what I heard this was a great experience for kids and spouses more than the alumni. They paid tribute to lost friends followed by alumni family slide show and a magic show.


I didn't cover much of lunch. But heard kids enjoyed the afternoon session very well. They left the campus in the evening to their lodging. Prasad was exhausted of sleeplessness and day-long excitement but was eager to go to the dinner party at the campus. This was arranged just outside the campus to allow for drinks for high spirited folks. 


Samir says things are going extremely well. He never anticipated this amount of energy, show of affection, happiness in the group. Raju says he never felt happier. I was not able to get to Ramesh Chakravarthy and many others, it is understandable; no one talks for over a minute. Don't be a pest, I got to go, they say.


Feel free to write your experiences here so they all stay at one place for us to come back and read in the future.


Best,
GK

Moderation in Group Emails

Following Raju's email, this blog has been setup to capture group-members' feedback.

We spent over 20 years away from one another and now, it may be hard to find what content is offending. This is a genuine challenge and everyone should work in educating the group by spotting the offending content. Let us give timely feedback; openly or anonymously. Please try to quote the content as specific as possible, briefly explain why it is offending (derogatory, discriminating etc) , and quantify the level of offense, whenever possible.

Any attempt to help the group understand the range of tolerance, is appreciated. You may email out your opinion to the group or use this blog to express your opinion openly or anonymously.

Best regards,

Gopal

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For your ready reference, here is the request from Raju, emailed on June 10:

Dear Friends,

During the past 6 months we have all been having a great time re-establishing our contacts with old friends, getting to know their families, knowing more about batch mates who have been mere acquaintances during the 4 years of college.

We are at the same time exchanging health tips, investment tips, enjoying some wife bashing and husband bashing, learning facts, exchanging views on upbringing of children and many more useful and enjoyable things.

During this period we have not only re-introduced ourselves but also introduced our spouses and kids to the group. We have effectively widened out group base from batch mates to batch mates and their families. We have in certain cases also started to address the kids directly.

Under this framework of family involvement, we need to show a certain level of restraint in posting mails that could be accidentally read by the spouse or the children and lead to unintended consequences. We feel that a couple of recent posts do fall under this category, and request all to show more prudence before posting "Naughty" mails. Beware of accidentally pressing the SEND button before before changing the group id to personnel id - as has already happenned in a few cases.

Thank you for Understanding.

*******************************************

100 Days Celebration

శత దినోత్సవ శుభాకాంక్షలు! 


February 19th, 2010

It is 100 days since the inception of this email group on November 12th. This is a major milestone on our road to the reunion. This group has brought a renewed spirit of enthusiasm, excitement and positive energy to locate all our batchmates. At present we have 153 members and is growing by around 20 new members every month and we will not rest until we find all our classmates.

The member participation is also growing by leaps and bounds with each passing day evoking feelings of nostalgia and anticipation for the fast approaching reunion. Slowly and steadily participation is growing and more members are sharing their experiences and fond memories. This group has become a popular venue to reflect and reminiscence about our carefree college days. There are a total of 1600 messages and around 700 of them were posted this month alone.

The Picasa picture gallery has become another important avenue to introduce our family members and also to refresh our good old memories. More than 200 pictures have been uploaded so far and it has been quite an interesting experience to look at the physical changes caused by the aging process in our friends. How about the pictures of those new buildings in our college; don't they look awesome.

Hope everyone in this group has been reunited with at least one of their long lost friends. A big thank you to all of you for participating in this group and making it a huge success. Hoping to hear from all the friends more often and looking forward to meeting you at the reunion.


Here are some interesting stats of this group.


Cumulative Subscription

Cumulative email posts

Top posters This month 66 Ramana Nimmagadda 32 Ksrk Prasad 31 Raju 30 Suresh Kondaveeti 28 Krishna K. Muppavarapu(KK) 28 anuradhavuyyuru_1...@rediffmail.com 27 sa...@samirpalli.com 27 Subha Allu 25 Suresh V 25 Murali Duvapu All time 135 Ramana Nimmagadda 97 Gopal 78 sa...@samirpalli.com 76 Rangadham 69 Raju 60 Murali Duvapu 56 Krishna K. Muppavarapu(KK) 55 Subha Allu 54 Ksrk Prasad 50 anuradhavuyyuru_1...@rediffmail.com Best compliments, Communications Committee

Reunion Invitation

">JNTU Kakinada 89 Alumni Reunion Invite

Satya Gowri Theater

If you ask me to name the most memorable place outside the campus, I would say without any hesitaion, "Satya Gowri Theater". I enjoyed my every trip to Satya Gowri. They played Hollywood titles and to my liking, picked decent ones most of the times. Boy, they had the best sound system though the theatre won't look all that fancy from outside. At the theater there was this street show guy doing puzzles with metal rings. I never saw any one solving them (except him). When I went to the show early I used to watch his puzzles. I never paid him though. I certainly would pay now.

It is located at the far end of the Cine Street. Never tired to ride the bike there :-)

GK