Birthdays and Anniversaries in October v09.10

Dear Friends,
Hope you have had a great Dussehra and are gearing up for celebrating Diwali. For folks in the Bay Area, there is the inter-IIT Diwali Dhamaka this year at the Campbell Heritage Theater (1 W Campbell Ave, Campbell, CA) on 3rd October from 4pm to 11pm. Tickets can be got here.

Since we are in the tenth year after graduation, we were thinking about having some kind of a reunion for the batch to celebrate this. Most of us finished our last exams and presentations at IIT in May 2000 and we got our degrees in August 2000. So I propose having the reunion sometime in June / July. For the parents in the batch in US and India this fits neatly with school vacations. Logistically this would mean a few things:

  1. Deciding the venue – By my estimates based on the BTech96 – Who is Where list, we have people distributed across the following main geographies. Given the impracticality of having people travel internationally (or even transcontinental) for this, we could have the reunion in 3-4 different places and have people congregate to the venues most convenient to them. Given the number of theoretical computer scientists amongst us the optimization should not be a problem:
    1. India: Delhi – 5 (6 if you include Ahuja in Nangal), Bangalore – 4, Hyderabad – 3, Mumbai (and Pune) – 2
    2. US East Coast: 8 (Anupam Rastogi is in Philly, the rest are in NY)
    3. US Mid-West: 3 (Chicago and Madison)
    4. US West Coast: 9 in the Bay Area, 2 in South California, 6 in Seattle/Redmond
    5. US Others: 2 (Kapil Verma in Dallas and Kate in Austin)
    6. Singapore: 4
    7. Hong Kong: 2
    8. London: 2
    9. Munich: 1
  2. Deciding what we will do – It is here that I draw a blank. I guess each venue could be at a different kind of a location, decided upon by the people based out of that venue.

Obviously planning a big event takes time, hence this is being sent out so early. Please feel free to pitch in with your suggestions.

Next, big congratulations to Vijay Amrit Raj Sharma and Vandana on the birth of Arth! And best wishes to Gagan and Parikshit for tying the knot this month!

Also, Vamsi informed me that his son is called Naithik. “It means moral/ ethical. This guy would be heavily obligated to do the right thing :)”, he gushed.

And now the long list of folks are celebrating their birthdays this month:

  1. Aradhana Khandekar
  2. Gokul Varadhan
  3. Dinakar S Rao
  4. Ashish Ahuja
  5. Sayontan Sinha
  6. Anupam Rastogi
  7. Shivaji Das
  8. Anuj Khare
  9. Mohit Agnihotri
  10. Shilpa (Mrs. Sharad Mittal)
  11. P. Suman Kumar
  12. Rutu (Mrs. Sulabh Agrawal)
  13. Amogh Akella

Happy Birthday, everyone!

Lastly, the usual notices:

  1. Please keep your coordinates updated. You can send me (Tantan) an email and I will take care of it.
  2. Please do let us know if we have got any dates wrong or missing.
  3. This announcement is also posted on the Announcements page on BTech96 at http://btech96.org/announcements/

Cheers,
Tantan and Vaibhav.