We’ll shoot on the audi steps

nah, I have a Saturday class while they are at the audi

jetty then?

will be difficult to get them all there !

screw it, its Tata Hall then..

alright…alright…!!

So here we were, setting the cameras up in the Tata Hall lawn….

it’s too noisy here. these people think they are back in play school; what a mess..!…what a noise !

dude, play schools aren’t messy. They are much disciplined

my bad. You are right. Not difficult to understand him getting emotional about playschools. He sure is a recent pass out from one of those. With his baby face and all that….

We were a group of select, elite people; The ER cell video team handpicked by Aswin and Jandeep. Five minutes into the task, our roles were getting defined. Apoorv Khandelwal will be operating one camera. The ever energetic Teany Thomas will be at the second camera. And of course the most important roles fell to me – the slayer of mosquitoes, the bringer of beer and generous provider of dslr globe.

The plan was to ask three questions to the who’s who of corporate India buzzing around in merry gangs, enjoying their time with friends they made 25 years ago. After quite a few attempts to get someone to give us an interview, we realized that it’s not working – nobody was coming in.

 guys, this aint working. We need to execute a strategy reorientation.

 (kaisa globe maar raha hai) what if we offer them chocolates?

 Dude, really?  

 (shit, shouldnt have said that) No yaar.

Googling hard for a while, we found a strategy pattern prevalent in the biggest of organizations in the world – from investment banks to luxury hotels – that can be effective for our task at hand….And decided to explore the potential of employing intelligence, beauty and glamour…! After a campus wide search for the rare combination of the above mentioned traits and several round of interviews, we zeroed in on Aparna Pillai and Ankita Gupta.

 And boy, did it work..!

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We asked the Alums to describe iimc in a phrase….and as you can guess the answer always contained the word ‘fun’ and sometimes just that alone…

To our questions about their takeaways from iimcal, some people glanced at their spouses, gave a wry smile, regained composure and then gave us globe…

The last question literally stumped a few, but most of them answered right(hopefully). And whoever couldn’t get it right sworn that they know exactly where their hostel room is and claimed it’s just that they forgot the room number.

Business heads of the biggest of companies, entrepreneurs and faculties at universities across the globe, these people we were talking to were literally the closest projections of what we are going to be in another 25 years from now. And it was overwhelming to see their love and fondness for their alma mater. The institute was a different experience for each of them – some lead a teacher’s life as they taught the entire batch before exams; to another few it was the freedom to choose their life priorities that appealed; while it was a sweet romantic two years for a few, some thought they got a Post Graduate Diploma in Music;

“with a broken guitar”, his friend adds.

Clearly, Joka has preserved the spirit and essence of life that existed in this campus all those years ago. And I don’t think these experiences are any different for us; nor will it be for the coming generations.

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Shooting this video was a lot of fun. We had a plan in mind as to how it should look in the end and planned the shooting accordingly, like including shots of people coming in and leaving the frame. There were moments of absolute chaos when every now and then the memory card would run out with people still talking in their natural flow into the camera. It did help to have two cameras running so we were able to escape embarrassment.

It took us a while to put it together. The whole work was near complete when Apoorv’s laptop crashed, forcing a rework from scratch. And my Net Book crashed when I tried to play one of the HD videos we shot.