THE MAKING OF THE ‘BE EXTC YEARBOOK’

‘Just when journeys come to an end do we realise what we have and what we are about to leave behind.’

This is how the Foreword of the BE EXTC Yearbook begins. For the uninitiated, BE EXTC is my class. I am in final year engineering and in some time from now my college life is about to come to an end. Keeping this in mind, my classmates decided to make a Yearbook to capture all the memories that we can and keep with ourselves something to cherish always!!!

It’s been one hell of a ride, I must admit!! I don’t know exactly who put forth this idea but Abhishek aka Sheku was the pioneer of it all. Then onto the bandwagon jumped Alok and when he put forth the idea to me I couldn’t keep myself away from joining the ride-which turned out to be a great journey indeed!

Not many people in our class were really upto it when we began our ’campaign’ in order to get the entire class to participate. When we began there were not many people who were willing to put their pens down to write for the Yearbook. Alok and I were really skeptical about how many articles we would get but Sheku kept insisting, “Tu dekh re, aayega articles. Aaram se 20 tak aayega!” Today on completion of this Yearbook I have to tell you Sheku, you were right!! We had to edit Nikhil’s article to accommodate another piece that came in just as we were about to send it for print! Now, when we do look at all the material we have assembled it makes us proud!! We have managed to do a decent job in just 2 weeks!!

I’m glad that my class did co-operate with me in all the things I made them do. Right from getting each person’s thumb print for the cover page to getting their signatures for the back page and also giving me their childhood pictures! I’m sure someone must have said, “Sameen ka hat gaya hai!!” or “Kya shot de rahi hai!” But anyway what I wanted done, I got it done!!

My Editor-in-Chief, Alok Mohare has been a really sweet editor! He had absolutely no hang ups about anything and it was a real pleasure putting this Yearbook together with him!! Not to forget, I have to mention the AMAZING lunch that we had at Alok’s place when we went there for our first day of compiling the Yearbook!!!

His Dad prepared lunch for the day and it was the most amazing food I have had in a very long time! I did stuff myself and for all those who don’t believe that I stuffed myself Alok’s Dad is proof enough!! Also, it was a lot of fun counting the votes we received for the ‘Award Winning’ section of our book. (Whatever that means!)

Along with all the fun we had, we did a decent amount of work too!! I have to mention Jubin here, who has been THE man in putting all our pictures together and working so hard on the Yearbook Profile!! Hats off to him for being so meticulous and for being a VERY important part of our team!!!

Our second day ‘workstation’ was at Abhishek’s place! By now we had started work on the Collages and the Profiles of everyone in class and once this was done we could sit back and relax. It looked liked an easy job but it certainly wasn’t. We worked as hard as we could and then we were treated some (more) amazing lunch that Sheku made for us. That was another lunch that I really loved and I ate to my heart’s content!! (You are a great cook Abhishek!!)

But I have to say, editing the articles we received was an absolutely irritating job. Only because, we received Word documents typed in the most advanced SMS language to infect the English on this planet. Changing ‘n’ to ‘and’, ‘da’ to ‘the’, ‘dats’ to ‘that’s’ (and a whole lot more) drove me crazy. And my Word Dictionary is also infected with that kind of language now. I’m not going into the details of how we had to calculate ad re-calculate our budget for the book to suit everyone’s pockets and the number of shops we had to visit in order to get a decent printer. It was a part and parcel of the entire process and now I just hope what the printer does with it is liked by one and all!

I learnt one very important thing from this entire process. I spent 2 weeks doing all the required work for the Yearbook and in these 14 days I realised that sometimes the people you expect to support you might not just be there! My sister always tells me that ‘One should not expect anything in any form at all.’ Gautam Buddha said that, she tells me. And I must admit Gautam Buddha was so right! It does hurt when such things happen but I also learnt that you must take it in your stride.

Anyway, that was getting too melancholy! I enjoyed the entire process a lot and I sincerely hope that everyone likes the Yearbook too. We worked pretty hard at it and I earnestly wish that my classmates cherish it as much as I will cherish ‘The Making of the BE EXTC Yearbook.”