Do Farewells really Fare-Well these days

The motivation for this post must go to recent spate of farewells that i was really seeing all around me. People all around me started criticizing the cause of poor farewells to lack of cohesion and unity. True, i must agree that factions and small groupisms do have a negative role and it is always human tendency to form groups within groups. (About groups - A Tale of two groups is one post coming up soon on this blog)

Well ... Modern Technology does have a major role in which farewells fail to evoke the same kind of sentiment that was there much earlier.

The pervasive nature of Mobiles and technology such as "Chat", "Orkut" and Email really have brought people much closer than they ever imagined. Separation was no longer a hated word. People stay connected right throughout .. Even taking mobiles to their bathrooms was being considered a status symbol. Under such a situation, how can one feel the emotion and separation in a farewell function ? All such things happened during my good old days as there were no mobiles at that time and email was expensive. Being in touch by the friendly postal department was the one and only way of being in touch. The farewell function brought back memories and the mere feeling of being separated in days time brought tears to some of the eyes.

The second might be the "AGE - factor" . It is time that due to global climatic conditions (i have been working hard on my kyoto project lately :) ), people are ageing rapidly. The trend is disturbing because it is "More in the mind these days and less in the body". Once you come to an MBA, this trend is even more seen .. People are 28 at the age of 23. Everyone tries to be a manager and the presence of youthfullness is seen as a sign of weakness and immaturity in such a world. The younger you are, the more passion, love and exuberance that you might have for such functions. Age drills in a lot of useless notions and impurity in one's head and teaches one to remain as un-emotional as possible.

The third and the final one has to be presence of faculty. Somehow at MBA level faculty, barring a few exceptions, have just been mere facilitators. The student - teacher interaction at an informal level was non-existent for most of the cases. A faculty presence in a farewell at times brings back memories of his or her class at that particular moment and transports your mind back to those good-ol days ... Bottom-line ... We all missed our dearest Prof. A Parasuraman in the farewell. A farewell speech from him, would have really made us feel that we are going to miss IIT for a long long time.

Somehow, i still remember my 10th class farewell till date. I knew that i would be moving out soon due to my Dad's umpteenth transfer to another place (Some how he still continues to do so). Some of the skinny faces i saw then have turned out to be fine young men to date. Infact, the skinniest bespactled fellow joined a gym after that and now can give a model a run for his money. The females have turned out to be the same .. (Dumping people then .. and doing the same now . hehehehe !!!) ... Your's truly was the fattest in his batch and has done a lot of work over the years to stay in shape ...

Some of the faces of year 1997 were

"Kunte Karate" - An engineer with Infosys now
"Rocky" - Again an engineer with Infosys
"Alampalli/Bandar" - Unable to locate him these days . He's somewhere in US...
"Moti" - Last heard, he was toiling in some auto company in US
"Doctor Bhalla" - She's delivering a baby a month now ... hehehe .. chill !! she's a gynic
"Padu" - A CA rocking toiling hard for his clients
"Gauri" - An MBA somehow trying to break even in Finance
"Sallu Bhai" - A politician joining the footsteps of his dad
"Battery" - A person hell-bent on accumulating degrees to date.

Anyway, some of the faces i hope will rock in the year 2017 in addition to this list

-- The bearded One - Paramjit Singh
-- The one and only fashion icon / The elvis of my batch - Sudhanshu Diwakar
-- The Gult with a Mallu Moustache - Ravindra Bob or rather Bob to everyone
-- The CEO - Shreevardhan Kabra
-- The Net-worker ( Shared by Aravindan and Mohit agarwal )
-- The Topper - Amrutaunshu
-- Mama and Mappilai - Aswin and Ashok
-- Youth Icon - Arun V
-- K7/Poet - yours truly
-- MOJO - One and only Mandar Suhas Joshi
-- NAWAB - Kumar Abhinav Srivastava - Man of vast untapped potential

That's it from me right now .. More posts on the "Top - 5 topics" that one might discuss in a future alumni meet after 10 years ...