Our 40th
My ex-boss Wayne had a favorite quote, he used to say, “Like wine, engineers mature over years, but unlike wine, people don’t love mature engineers. Whether others love you or not, you must make a difference, that’s what engineers are all about. Make a difference in the lives of others, make a difference in your company, make a difference in your family. Leave every place slightly better when you depart.” I am reminded of that quote on our 40th for several reasons.
When the clock started ticking after our graduation, it was known that it would hit the forty-year mark at some point. So, why is the 40th still a big deal? It is a big deal because the forty-year mark would typically take an engineer to his or her retirement, in other words, a promising career that began forty years ago would come to an end. For many, ‘forty years’ would invoke sentiments like ‘old’, ‘forgotten’, ‘irrelevant’, perhaps even, ‘it is nothing special’! Our forty-year mark is a good time to reflect, “How did we do? Did we get it right? Did our batch make a difference collectively?”
For us, in the class of 1983, the forty-year elapsed time wasn’t long. To us, 1983 to 2023 was like a blink, it went in a flash. As if, we went out in the world as young adults and suddenly became old. As if, it was just the other day in mid-1983, we came out of the first gate and boarded a Howrah-bound crowded 55 in front of Tarun-da’s shop! For many of us, the life we have had with our families, and children in the interim forty-year blink seems like a dream – the four-year period in Shibpur seems like the real thing. Imagine that! Four years is ten percent of forty years. No matter what the world might say, our 40th is very special. There is only one dark reminder that could claw us back to the real world from that forty-year blink. That’d happen when we’d suddenly remember that Tanmay, Rajarshi, Anisur, Dilip, Krishnendu, Arup, Debashish, Subhasis, Kollol, Manab, Proshanto, Amit, Kumaresh, and some other batchmates were not with us anymore. That reminder would rankle, and we would all agonize over it “Why them? They were not old!”
The idea of celebrating our 40th in the campus felt like a pilgrimage because that was where it all started. It’d be like a homecoming or going back to one's roots. The idea caught on like wildfire in our social media groups. One 1983 classmate recently posted that he still longed for the adda in H16. He wanted to hug his H16 wingmates, and he said he’d never let go. Another said he would like to go around the campus and look at the old buildings one more time. A very dear classmate of mine said he would like the reunion celebrations to spread over two days because one day might not give him enough time. I thought I could feel the tingling sensation of the cool evening breeze from The Ganges that touched our faces during every post-dinner stroll from Pandya Hall towards Model School. Clearly, time had taken us out of Shibpur, but it had not been successful in taking Shibpur out of us. That association is part of who we were and who we are to this day.
When we embarked on our journey as young engineers in 1983, we didn’t know where we would end up. Perhaps, some were better prepared than others, but most were clueless. Many of us went to BE College from lower middle-class families that did not have many role models, often our professors and seniors in BE College filled those voids. In the formative years of our lives, in more ways than one, our teachers, seniors, and the campus culture shaped our worldviews. Sometimes that influence was overt, and sometimes it was not. But as a community, slowly and subtly, they influenced our value systems and taught us how to interpret the language of the real world. In those days, most employment opportunities came from the public sector, job hopping, and job shopping were new words. Students were considered lucky if they managed to get a job!
India as a country had not opened up, so overseas travel was an exception, not the norm. We inherited a value system that was grounded in fairness, hard work, and integrity. Even with all that, in 1983, our future was uncertain! We were after all from a state college in Eastern India.
During our time, campus life in BE College was different as well. Some of you might recall those days. There was no internet, no cell phone, no email. We wrote letters by hand on a yellow parchment called the post-card. If we needed to call outside the state, we had to book an STD call. Today, folks do not know what Subscriber Trunk Dialing (STD) was. There was no social media then, so we could not ‘like’ or ‘unfriend’ people at will. Our food was different then, and so was our attire and vocabulary. Google did not exist, so we could not ‘google’ people; ‘google’ was not a verb then! Politics was there, but it had not permeated all walks of life like today. Merit mattered and prevailed in most life events. BE College trained us for our journey of life in many ways. The knowledge of our engineering discipline taught in classes and the soft skills required to thrive on campus were all part of that larger preparation. We had great role models in our departments and hostels. Because of that preparation, the class of 1983 did quite well. For some of us, parts of that journey might have felt bumpy, but in the end, most of us found our calling and adapted to thrive. For our collective success, we owe a debt of gratitude to BE College. Most in the class of 1983, would agree that they took away much more than a BE Degree from Shibpur.
From that uncertain, and a rather ‘middle-class’ beginning, the class of 1983 produced hundreds of brilliant engineers across many disciplines. During our forty-year blink, many of our classmates rose to senior executive positions in public and private sector companies. Some batchmates made their mark in academia as educators and administrators, and some directed national-level institutes. Some have authored technical books that are used in colleges and universities all over. Not just in the field of science and technology, our batchmates made their mark as singers, musicians, photographers, and writers. Among other things, one of our batchmates might be the most successful Bengali writer from BE College since the legendary Narayan Sanyal. The class of 1983 has had its share of entrepreneurs as well, both in India and overseas. If those are not examples of the audacity of aspirations of the 1983 batch, I do not know what those could be!
In one of his memorable songs Gurudev Rabindranath had said “আপন হেত বািহর হেয় বাইের দঁাড়া,
ব0েকর মােঝ িব4েলােকর পািব সাড়া.” Those words could be loosely translated as ‘if you manage to step outside of ‘self’ and your ‘ego’, in your heart you’d discover a calling from the wider world’. In our
lives, BE College did its best to push us beyond our egos and open our minds to that calling of the wider world. It prepared us for all kinds of learning and encouraged us to go out of our comfort zones and knock at new doors. The foundation for future successes in our lives was laid in BE College. On the 40th year of our graduation, we should acknowledge and celebrate that. I hope my batchmates would agree that the class of 1983 got it right, by and large. When I look back and try to unpack that forty-year blink, I see that our batch made a difference in many ways. Those of us who are retired, and the few who aren’t, should take comfort in knowing that the class of 1983 made an impact in the lives of many others, in their companies, businesses, and families. In the real world, intent and impact are often orthogonal, they don’t converge, but I hope the accomplishments of the class of 1983 will reverberate as an exception in that regard.