Reflecting on My Engineering Days at SVCE, Pennalur

Dear Friends,

Mathematics & Events.

When I think of the four years I spent with you, these are the two words that comes to my mind first. And each of them for quite varied reasons.

The first one, Maths. Before a new reader of this article mistakes me for a maths genius, let me say this. I was simply incorrigible with the subject, I appeared for the first-year mathematics exam for seven-times consecutively. Luckily, I didn’t suffer a semester break due to a syllabus change. In the last semester and my seventh attempt, I went inside the hall knowing well that I will pass this time, not due to any sudden interest in the subject but thanks to the time and effort that Prof Gangadharan had invested on getting me to remember the basics in the previous weeks. He had taken my case as a challenge upon himself. It was the unwavering belief I had on the great teacher that helped me pass the subject and secure a “First Class” overall in my engineering degree. When I came out of the exam hall, relieved that I will pass this time, I remember my friend and lab partner “U.D.” mentioning to me that if I fail this time too, the next appearance will make it my eighth, a new record of sorts! It was the good stars of Udayakumar that protected him on that day from me.

Speaking of my long pursuit of winning my war with Maths, it will be incomplete without mentioning the centum that I scored in the fifth-semester Mathematics paper titled “Numerical Analysis and Methods”. You will not believe that I had hardly attended a single class of the subject during the entire semester. My good-friend Rajaji Ganesan had borrowed the notes from his elder brother’s tuition class, and we started studying only a week before the final exam. Luckily, we understood the notes and remembered everything in the exam. I think Rajaji scored a percentage or two lower than me, and to think he only got the notes and even explained the “maths” to me!

When friends ask me of my days in the classroom, I hardly remember anything, and the reason is the second word, Events. I rarely was inside the classroom. I tried everything I could to secure permissions to skip classes. Whether it was helping professors with some paperwork, or representing college in obscure speaking or debate events, or repairing the Novell Network in the department’s computer lab (most often it would’ve gotten down due to the bad TSR program I had written to get higher access), I did everything other than listen to lectures. As I am writing this, I can’t imagine my 19-year-old son who is going to an arts college now, being able to get away with something like this today – I feel things have gotten a lot tougher for students who are like me in recent years. Special thanks here to our department HoD Prof Ramachandran who kind heartedly granted me attendance whenever I pleaded for it.

A few events are noteworthy. The first one was a two-day workshop that myself and Mechanical Department student and my friend E.Magesh attended in University of Madras on AIDS awareness. We volunteered to the programme expecting things you will normally expect in those teenage years, but it turned out to be anything but. It was eye-opening on the misconceptions and plain lies (today’s parlance false news) in the society around us on the subject. Second, was when me and junior batch Computer Science student Ranganathan Sankaralingam (a former Googler) won awards on a debate titled CISC vs RISC – the CPU architecture wars, held in the prestigious Ramanujan Computing Centre of Anna University. And I was the only non-computer-science student to win an award that year.

For many of us, there was one event which can never go unmentioned. It was PANORAMA, our annual intercollege event conducted by Electronics-and-Communications (ECE) department. While the class toppers focused on the content and topics for the multi-day event, I got myself into the organization, inviting speakers, escorting them to the college, buying prizes and so on. In one of the years when we conducted the event, I was going out to every top corporate tech company in Chennai asking them for sponsorships. Those unsolicited reach outs, waiting in the lobby, getting our way to meet the decision makers, convincing them to part with their money to naive students representing an unknown event battle-hardened me like nothing else could’ve. Those scars proved invaluable when I started my own business in the next few years.

One of the executives I met during those pursuits was Mr P Asokan of then First Computers (Brilliant Tutorials), the connection I managed with him during this encounter later got him as my mentor which shaped my entire professional career.

Finally, Goan Feni. I am a teetotaller but none of us who went on the “unapproved” excursion to Goa can forget the experiences our classmates had with the brew from cashew. I will end this note by saying the “unapproved” tag came with the tour due to a whistleblower of our class.

I cherish every moment we spent together, laughing, learning, and growing. I hope you are all doing well, enjoying life and will continue to do so.

• T.N.C.Venkatarangan

The above article was written by T N C Venkatarangan. It was published in the ECE 92-96 Silver Jubilee Reunion magazine of Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Pennalur, Tamil Nadu on the 25th March 2023.

Reunion Pictures

A few pictures from our silver jubilee reunion event below:

Downloads

1. Read the article in Adobe Acrobat PDF format  
2. Read the entire magazine – ECE 92-96 Silver Jubilee Reunion magazine