They had a grand ball!

College years are considered to be the golden years of one’s life. From making lifelong friends, learning from brilliant teachers to bunking classes to watch a movie – the memories are endless. This trend has been going for years and not much has changed over the years.

One realised this when the batch of 1973 of St Joseph’s College of Commerce (SJCC) recently met after 40 years. The reunion spread across four days and the group aptly called its meet Chalees Saal Baad.

Most of them were meeting for the first time since passing out, but it definitely didn’t feel so. The camaraderie they all shared, erased all the years that had gone by. Over the fours days, the alumni not only visited their old classrooms but they also went for a weekend getaway and participated in fun-filled events. The highlight was however, when they interacted with the current batch of SJCC.

Incidentally, 1973 batch happened to be the first batch of SJCC, and as students then they had experienced a whole lot of things including watching sheep graze on the campus field. Malini Sridhar, an executive director of a counselling centre in the City, says that returning to college after so many years was an experience by itself. “This entire reunion has been a lot of fun. One could see how most of us haven’t changed at all. The old jokes that we shared back then are still making rounds. We all may have gone our different ways but the bond has remained,” she adds.

Former test cricketer and honorary secretary of Karnataka State Cricket Association, Brijesh Patel, says, that he remembers how the college used to encourage everyone in sports. “Since we were the first batch, the facilities were very basic but the teachers were very good. Since I was into sports, I hardly had time to attend classes but I still remember every year our coach gave us two new cricket bats to play with,” he shares. Many said that the batch was very involved in sports. In fact, many recalled that they would make up their attendance through participating in sports. Close to 75 alumni made it for the reunion and many of them had come from abroad just to be a part of it. Tracy Carvalho, who works with the United Nations, met her classmates for the first time since she passed out. Though she was in touch with a few of them on a social networking site, meeting all of them in person was an experience she says she will never forget. “Commerce was one subject that not many girls took up. In our batch too, we were just a handful of girls in a class of 100 boys. But we put up a tough fight, we were so notorious that the teachers often said that the girls were more naughty than the boys,” she adds. From picnics, lunches, cocktail parties to spa treatments, the batch of ’73 sure knew how to make a reunion memorable.