Nostalgia at Convocation 2000
by Amit Kumar

They were the same roads , just that there were new speed-breakers all over , which were scientifically designed by the Civil Engineers of DCE to make any car driver shiver to the scratching sound whenever he tried overcome the barrier put in his otherwise so normal journey. And I had gone there after almost two years.

It occasion was the convocation ceremony of The Delhi College of Engineering. The Venue was the DCE (new) campus. The convocation which was being held in the fifth month of 2001 was actually the Convocation 2000 for the batch of 1999. But as the wise men say , better late than never.

As we reached college we started taking out all the equipments we had used the most in the four years of our learning at the DCE. After all it was a convocation for us , and what best tribute could we engineers give other than using those equipments once again. And these most used equipments were a cricket Bat and a ball. Undoubtedly , the most used equipments of my engineering. Soon the Cricket team was all set and going. There were hits , misses , unpleasantness exchanged in choicest Punjabi. Though a few torch bearers were missing, but they were remembered by quoting their famous curses.

The  second part of the day was scheduled to go into the activity which we indulged in quite regularly. Jerry , the Canteen/Mess contractor, was asked to serve us all with eatables and drinkables ,and continuing the tradition of non-payment at the canteen and the mess , we did not open our wallets. The people started pouring in after that , the friendly old Sardar was there , the sick poet was there and so were the females of our batch, the rare species were surprisingly still not extinct , in fact they happened to be really coping up well in life after four years of trauma.

The students who looked not more than dirty old poor students now carried digital cameras ,mobiles phones and palm tops, but all the hi-tech was just another layer of abstraction on their core DCEite hearts. The discussion topics were changed to Business Management from Single phase motors. And there were still people like me who still neither wanted Single Phase Induction Motors nor the Business Management which I am a victim of at my workplace.

The convocation started with people from all over the Government of India and Government of Delhi , speaking their hearts out so audibly that perhaps only one of two mikes could hear what they really wanted to say, while the students began to faint in the last rows. And it was time to cope with boredom, just like good old College style ... we  started the "Gravity Down" ... an improvised version of Quattropoli. A 7 by 6 grid of unevenly drawn  squares , something which can be found on all the sheets of paper I proudly called class notes. And soon the degree distribution ceremony started , and ended sooner. The degrees were given out in haste , to get over with the last batch of the last millennium as soon as possible.

After a few frantic exchanges of visiting cards , it was time to go back to the real world , where playing Cricket as regularly as breathing in and out wasn't possible , where salaries mattered more than Mess bills, where games you played were corporate games of success and failures, where trips no longer meant those to PVR, and where the DCEite was still a DCEite.

Contributed By Amit Kumar
EE '99, Cadence Design Systems

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