Class of 56 Reunion - November 2006

Everyone of the 60s will remember Ubi (H. S. Uberoi). His family is now three generation Cathedralites, with grandchildren now in the school.

Can any of you identify Ubi in this picture.

1958 School Hockey 1st Eleven

Ubi is the one sitting second from left. I am the goalkeeper sitting on the ground.

I had a long and detailed email from him the other day. He and Meena Bhatt (née Lele) are planning the 50 year reunion of 56ers to be held in November 2006.

11 months away, but let me assure you, time just flies away and unless you start this early, you will never have a reunion worth its weight in gold.

According to Ubi, the 56er girls (ladies) are well organised, but the boys (gentlemen?) are not so closely knit. Ubi has sent me a list of class fellows that he remembers off-hand (apologising profusely for any ommissions), and would like any of you who knows any of these to ask them to get in touch with Ubi, or me, so that you can be included in the mailings about the programme.

So if any of these listed below happen to be your friend, brother, cousin, in-law, neighbour - please ask them to send me an email via this blog using the comments section.

1. Iqbal Chaiwalla
2. Zareer Adajania
3. Waseem Brelvi
4. Muku Hamied
5. Badhniwalla
6. Ravi Dandekar
7. Sohrab Kapadia
8. Isaac Hyam
9. Sudhir Grover
10.Banatwalla
11.Amin Jaffer.
12.Mustan Currimjee
13.Zulfi Currimjee
14.Daryanani
15.Jimmy Tata
16.Shyam Chainani
17.Ernest Haskell
18.Ranjit Matthan
19.Michael Tahseen
20.Timmy Khattau
21.H.S.Uberoi
22.Pradeep Anand
23.Ramesh Gupta

I have been assured by Ubi that someone will represent Kirti Dongersee, who tragically passed away the day the Senior Cambridge results were announced in 1957, when his scooter skidded at Nariman Point. All of us in the school were put in a state of shock as Kirti had been such a wonderful and lovable character, our school Cricket Captain and a great off-spin bowler.

I have also been assured that someone will represent the School Captain of 1956, another character extraordinary, the late Tara Malkani, who went to the Olympics to run in the 100 metres for India.

Staff members of that era are more than welcome to join in the fun and frolic.

Better halves will be well entertained watching this motley crew celebrate!

The proposed programme - subject to review, comment and changes, as thought appropriate, is:

1.The girls are all going to Pune for 4 days early November 2006.
2.Cocktails on 10th or 11th November 2006.
3.12th or 13th November 2006 - an outing to Alibag.
4.14th November 2006 morning church service at the St. Thomas' Cathedral, followed by tea
at school and a class photograph.
5.Dinner at a venue to be selected on evening of 14th November 2006.

I hope you will help Ubi and his crew organise a great reunion.

I unearth another of my CatCall articles

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had written 3 articles for CatCall.

I just discovered the second.

When I was searching for postal addresses of some 59ers, I stumbled on the second of my articles entitled Diversity. Maybe I will also discover the third one that I wrote!

Many people have asked me what has been the greatest benefit to me of my having studied in Cathedral. I am sure that this is a common question to all those who have had the opportunity to study in good schools. There are indeed many possible answers. Going back to my school days itself, one would be overwhelmed and say that it was the excellent teaching staff, such as John Billington, William (Willie) Shiri and 0. A. Gregory, or the late Glyne-Howell, Arthur Morecroft (who saved my life), Stan [Pop Pharaoh, Rider Salmon, Denzel Timmins, W. H. (Hugh) Thompson, and / or the excellent opportunity not only for a format classroom education but also the availability of good sports education including athletics, badminton, boxing, cricket, football, hockey, lemon drop cricket, physical training, quad football, swimming, table tennis, tennis etc. This, despite the fact that the school was located in the centre of a massive city with not an inch of sports field in our complex. And maybe I should also add the great traditional sports like marbles and spinning tops, and other seasonal games that we played during the breaks.

more....

The findians.com domain name is now dead so you will find me at

http://jmatthan.blogspot.com

as well as this Seventh Heaven site.

Adil sends me a great picture

I have so much great input these days that I have a sort of waiting list to put stuff on the blog.

I jumped this up the queuse as it covers three separate class years - 1962 to 1964, a group of old Cathedralites of the early and mid sixties.

The picture below was taken at the races in Mahalaxmi about 4 years ago !!

From right to left is: Feroze Vakil (1963/64); Reuben Solomon (1963/64);
David Nissim (1964/65) and Adil Gandhy (1962/63).

Feroze lives & works in Bombay/Pune and his spouse is Shernaz (née Neterwalla). He has 2 children, a boy and a girl, both of whom are studying in the USA at present.

Reuben Solomon lives & works in Manchester (U.K) and visits India quite often. He has a few race horses in Bombay/Pune and hence this photograph taken at Mahalaxmi Race Course, Bombay. Reuben's spouse is Linda. He has two sons. The elder who works in London and the younger in L.A.

David Nissim. Who lives in Israel and works for El -Al since the past over 30 years. He flies into Bombay quite often and always loves to go upto his favourite hill station Matheran. David has an elder brother, the ever popular prankster Ivan Nissim, who is a school teacher and lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. I forget David's wife's name, but he also has a boy and a girl, who both live & work in Israel.

And 62-63er Adil. He sent me this profound piece of wisdom, so I leave you to figure out who he is!

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar.

He shook the jar lightly.

The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an infamous "yes."

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.

The golf balls are the important things: your family, your children, your faith, your health, your friends, and your favourite passions; things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter: your job, your house, and your car.

The sand is everything else: the small stuff. "If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend."

Mine is a long black espresso.

And that's for you.

With such pearls of wisdom from Adil, I am sure several of you will identify him!

Thanks for sharing this with us, Adil.

An entry in three of my blogs

Prof. Ajeet Mathur, a good friend, a Mumbai Cathedralite and also a Delhi Stephanian, has just sent me an electronic copy of an article which has just appeared in a publication celebrating the history of Tampere, the major industrial city in South Finland, his present domicile.

I thought it appropriate to provide a link to it on all my three blogs, my personal blog, the Cathedralite Seventh Heaven Blog and the Stephanian Kooler Talk Web Version Blog.

Having read it during its composition stage, I can say that it is hot, hot, hot.

I had dicussed this with him just last weekend and wondered whether he thought some of his more caustic comments would get through the "Editors" (Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko and Antti Kasvio (eds.) eCity: Analysing the efforts to generate local dynamism in the City of Tampere to Meet the Challenge of Changing Global Economy, Tampere University Press, 2005).

He was on his seat's edge.

The book appeared publicly today, and he immediately wrote to me thus:

The Tampere book is published and officially released with my article intact!

With "Communities at Risk" (2003) and this, I have the satisfaction of having given sufficient warning of the shape of things as a dutiful resident as part of my respect for the flag I live under.

I shall post you a published copy tomorrow.

Here is the electronic version. Please feel free to circulate it to those who care or blog it as you wish.

Someday, when I have a personal homepage, I would be happy to provide a link to it for all interested persons to know. But that may not be before March 2006 because I am a technical ignoramous and have other things on my mind now.

Best Regards to you and Annikki,

Ajeet

If Ajeet is an technical ignoramous, I wonder what I am!!

"Communities at Risk" is also another great piece of work by him.

His Discussion Paper "Finland - India - Economic Relations A Twinning Study of Trade and Investment Potential" published in 1998 was a ground-breaking publication.

I had the honour of co-authoring the paper "To Serve or To Rule? Paradoxes of Shared Authority and Appropriated Power in E-governance". It was read by Ajeet at the e-Governance Conference in New Delhi in Decwember 2003 as I could not attend.

Here is an example of the hard-hitting writing of Ajeet in this article:

There are a variety of myths circulating in Tampere designed to foster confidence among residents and prospective partners and investors in Tampere that do not stand up to a reality check. In popular perception, the two universities, particularly the Tampere University of Technology spawns innovations; these innovations are incubated in a virtual science park; and, incubated innovations create new dynamic enterprises attracting large amounts of venture capital thereby creating a multiplier effect for new jobs and enhanced flows of incomes and asset creation. In reality, public money in the guise of projects has been used to fund jobs with soft targets and when a project ends, a 'next big project' is needed to repeat the cycle, since little of lasting value remains. Names of agencies change, agencies merge with each other to acquire fresh identities, new organisations get mandated and organizational forms undergo such metamorphosis that old wine in new bottles is easily mistaken for a new engine of innovation on which hope is pinned for a while until it is dashed again. Hermia was an ingenius institution that enabled students of the Tampere Technical university to be drafted into labouring for companies needing cheap student labour while the flowback from the beneficiaries to the University remains unknown. The total amount donated by Tampere region companies (including Nokia) to Tampere Technical University is about Euro 250,000 according to the list coordinated by the Tampere Chamber of Commerce. With few exceptions, hardly any inventions of the University developed commercially as a return on public subsidies and investments and most of the firms counted in powerpoint presentations evangelising the Tampere model pre-date Hermia or have nothing to do with the Technical University. In making an actual count together with Hermia senior executives, I could locate only 13 enterprises in all under the umbrella of e-accelerator (the number on Hermia's powerpoint slide was 300), of which just two had something to do with the Tampere Technical University. The first pillar of Tampere's business development strategy, Hermia, was entirely focused on technology and real estate brokering, and never organised to provide any international business development expertise to existing firms or to new ventures. Hermia officials candidly admit they have no idea where the medium and large enterprises in the Tampere region obtain international business know-how.

In 1999, a second pillar, Professia Oy was established from public funds (and mandated to develop knowledge intensive business services in 2002). After five lacklustre years of existence, this agency launched a 'Tampere International Business Office' in mid-2004. This old-wine-in-new-bottle initiative never compiled even a starting kit for investors in the region. Most of its budget was spent on staff salaries for its seven employees and travelling to exhibitions and making contacts overseas to entice investors to Tampere. From € 1 million injected into it, an income of € 28,000 was reported which works out to 2.8 percent return on net assets, well below long term market interest rates. On 17.8.2005, Professia Oy merged with Oy Media Tampere which employed seventeen persons with a 2.2 percent return on net assets which is even lower than Professia Oy (according to the press release of the merger announced on 17.8.2005). The fused entity in announcing the merger hints at new horizons and a stronger organisation but its business plan remains unclear. The use of public funds in Tampere is not associated with transparency or disclosure and residents are expected to believe that this old-wine-in-new-bottle that didn't deliver much in five years of functioning will now function as the beacon of new hope. 'Project thinking' with soft targets is a hallmark of the Tampere region. The big breakthrough is always optimistically depicted to be in the future. During Spring 2005, hope was pinned that Tampere would host the ASEM summit in 2006 during the Finnish Presidency of the EU and the wave of traffic that would arise through Euro-Asia business contacts. Meanwhile, Hermia leading the ICT sector big projects was being hived and restructured to give way to the biotechnology and health sector spearheaded by Finn Medi under the ambitious catch-all expression of the next big project BIONEXT.

Ajeet pulls no punches. He tells it as it is.

You can download a pdf copy of the article from this link The Future of International Business in the Tampere Region1 by Prof. Ajeet Mathur, University of Tampere

Hope you enjoy it. I am sure Ajeet would love to have feedback from you on this paper.

It is my homour to share two alma maters with him!

Just discovered my article in CatCall

Thanks to 59er Hasnain Chinwalla for this great picture of our school:

Cathedral & John Connon School, Mumbai,
Copyright Hasnain Chinwalla

Many moons ago I was asked to write a series of articles for CatCall, our School Old Students magazine. I submitted three articles.

I heard one had been published and that the copies of the magazine were winging their way to me, but sadly, it has not arrived to date!

While browsing the Internet this morning, I found my first submission Seventh Heaven (Syndicated to findians.com, Oulu, Finland), online!

When I received a call from '57er Kashinath Dandekar asking whether the name "Seventh Heaven" was appropriate for my web page about my class, as it sort of raised the impression of a Bangkok massage parlour, I realised that much water had flowed under the bridge since my childhood days.

The year was 1955. Our class was situated on the ground floor just next to the chemistry laboratory. The class teacher was Mr [W. H.) Thompson (Hugh). Many of this group of boys - later became the outstanding class of '59 - one of the finest sets of students to graduate from our school.

During one English class, a suggestion was put forward that we should start a magazine. A competition was held to choose an appropriate name. Out of 30 excellent suggestions emerged "Seventh Heaven". This was a clear winner..... more

Remember that the URL given in the article is no more. All links must now point to this blog where I have archived all my previous issues of the Seventh Heaven Web Version.

You can read the whole article at the School Alumni site. Thanks for publishing it.

I have also heard that Catcall has been put on hold as they have not got any Editors to ensure that it is a regular publication.

Are you not glad that we have "Seventh Heaven"? :-)

Surfeit of 59ers Birthdays

In December we are blessed with many birthdays of 59ers.

Vikram Kamdar was on the 10th, Viney Sethi was (probably - bad memory) on the 11th, Noel Ezekiel and Peter Miovic are on the 13th and Anil Ruia is on the 17th.

Happy birthday all you guys.

Jacob does not forget any of you.

Hope you all have a great day on your respective birthdays and hope you all become a year younger.

Lets have some new photos for my album.

63ers Party in 61 / 62

Many thanks to Adil Gandhy for this great picture.

I recognise Kishore Shivdasani lounging in his inimitable style in front of the group.

(Click image to see larger image.)



Just think of the plea which accompanied the image submission.

With so many 63ers reading this blog, I do not think we will have much problem fulfilling his request.

Hello Jacob,

I am herewith forwarding an old photograph taken, I think, in 1961/62 of a class party of the batch of 1963/64 at Soosan Wadia's home at New Marine Lines (near Churchgate Station).

I do recognise quite a few but not all in the picture. I was not in this class but a year earlier.

I trust some 1963 batch person will recognise all and list the same on your site if you publish the same?

Cheers,

Adil Gandhy

Come on 63ers - stop our misery and help us out.

The first coomplete submission identifying the 25 participants (which will be verified with the team of 63er experts - Mithoo Malani, Ranko Ivancevic, Kishore Shivdasani (and a few others) will receive a miniature Alvar Aalto designed product. Alvar Aalto was the top Finnish architect and product designer.

Great news about 54er Nalini

I must thank 54er Sadhana Madhusadan (née Shah) from Pune who sent me this great news.

Mrs. Nalini Chandran (née Nair) is at the Hari Sri Vidya Nidhi School, Shree Rama Krishna, Ashramam Lane Punkunnam in Trichur, Kerala.



Mrs. Rita Wilson, Deputy Secretary, Holding additional charge of the Chief Executive and Secretary of the CISCE informed 54er Nalini that she was to be conferred the Derozio Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution in the field of Education and Human Enrichment by the Jury of the Driozio Award 2004.

The Award ceremony will be held at 9.30 am on 7th January 2006 at Brishop Cotton Boys' School. St. Mark's Road, Bangalore 560001 (one of my alma maters) at the venue of the Annual Conference of the Association of Heads of Anglo-Indian Schools in India.

I hope as many of you in Bangalore will turn out to congratulate Nalini on this historic occasion.

I am sure all of you join me in congratulating Nalini and share her happiness in receiving this award.