Connections

Four years, don’t know how they just flew by. Every time I read the word alumni, I told myself it must be a 40 year old greying (in my case soon to be balding) man telling his kids about the college he went to. But here I am 21 years old and have to call myself an alumnus sharing a learning I got in VNIT.

Who would have thought that so much could be given by a technological institute to a lanky Punjabi from Gujarat? 4 letters are responsible for changing my whole thinking pattern – VNIT.

Before coming to college, I just knew a handful of middle class school kids from Baroda and some cousins in North India. But VNIT expanded this whole horizon of connections. Now I know at least one person from every part of the country be it the North-east or the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. There are different people with different thinking patterns and working patterns and to understand all this is very difficult. It is an on-going process, but in VNIT I got a first-hand experience of dealing with different people. It’s just like the HSBC advertisement, Different Latitudes, Different People, One Bank. I’d say Different People, Different Languages, Different Colours, and One Connection – VNIT. An experience highlighting this point was when an Assamese friend from the Western Part of India posted on Facebook just when the vacations were ending “Now going to taste the food from all parts of India.” Apart from the placement the college provides, there are 3 intangibles that the college does provide. They are Friends, Knowledge and Experience. The experiencing of these differences of opinion, thinking, working, food preferences, songs, movies makes us tolerant and understanding of our diverse nation as a whole broadening our horizon as Paulo Coelho would put it. People write books on these differences in our nation, but I believe the best authors of such books could come from within our very own college. So lets just not look at VNIT as a college for providing technical expertise but also a provider of knowledge about the people of India

PS – I was writing this article while listening to a Telegu song, chatting with a friend in Jammu and flooding a friend’s e-mail asking him to send some of his home-made Manipuri pickle while sitting in Goa.