"It almost looked like a geriatric club. Except that all of us acted as if we were fifty years younger. Life had treated most of us well. And those who had their setbacks, health family career et al, appeared to forget the darker side in the company of friends from the distant past.

The occasion was a class reunion. The graduates of 1962 from what they now call CET. Since 1987 when we had the silver jubilee of graduation we have been meeting almost every year. Last year the venue was Bangalore and this year Chennai, but mostly we meet in Kerala towns. Of course the friends in Chennai or Bangalore would remember that the distance they have to travel is the same that we travel to their chosen “home towns” but since there are more people settled in Kerala the total inconvenience quotient would favour meeting in Kerala, especially Trivandrum which city probably has the largest concentration of classmates. That we who live in Trivandrum have to travel to Chennai to meet one another is another matter.

We were admitted to the engineering programme in 1957. We had followed the 11+1 pattern. The “PLUS ONE” that we crossed was called Pre University although the classes were indeed held by, and deemed part of, the University. We read not only Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry but also Biology and History besides two languages for Pre University. We were thus eligible for admission to engineering or medicine according to personal preferences. Once admitted we underwent a year of Pre Professional training. It was held in five selected colleges: Intermediate (now ARTS) College here, SB College (Changanassery), Maharaja’s College (Ernakulam), UCCollege (Alwaye) and GVC (Palghat, now spelt Palakkad). I was in the Alwaye College. We had those selected for Engineering, Medicine, Agriculture, Veterinary Sciences and Ayurveda. There was no second language and we in the Engineering stream did not have to study Biology. We also had a special programme for Engineering Drawing, for which the classes were held on Saturdays and taken by some PWD engineer. I found it beyond me then and I cannot see even now why it had to be there in the first instance! In the second term Government announced selection for Trichur Engineering College also and some of our friends who were in the medical stream joined the Mathematics class.

Those were the days, as any old man would say. We had an interview before the selection. I recall Dr. Kesava Rao, our Principal, asking me how concrete was made and my answering that I hoped to learn it after admission! Dr. Rao made some comment like “over smart” which I thought was a compliment until my father explained that it was a reprimand! There was no Entrance Examination. We were selected on the basis of the Pre Univeristy marks. I feel that despite being a bright student I may not have made it if there was the Entrance Test. I have written elsewhere, and advised successive ministers in charge of education, that the present system is heavily weighted in favour of the rich, the urban and the male. Unless you can afford a “P C Thomas” you cannot dream of a place in the first two hundred (which is what we needed when the total number of seats was only 200). So you had to be rich. If you came from a rural or semi urban background you did not have access to any Thomas Master unless you were even richer because you had to relocate to where the teacher held classes. Early morning as I take my constitutional at 4.45/ 5 a.m. I find boys pedaling there way to coaching classes, but girls have to be dropped by parents or brothers. So it is a male-preferred scenario too.

One advantage of the Pre Professional programme was that we came to know a large number of bright students whom we would otherwise have not met. Students in Alwaye came from places as far away as Kanhangad. Dr. Sarojini, the famous Dermatologist, who later came to Perumbavoor as the wife of renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Syamasundaran Nair, Dr. S. Balaram who ended up in the Human Rights Commission before retiring and many others would have been strangers but for the Pre Prof programme. It was a good time. We the professional students were deemed a class apart, and above, by the teachers. I was a student leader then too; perhaps the fact that I did my Pre Uni also in the same college helped, a kind of thinnamidukku. We were quite a few from the same class, but all except three of us parted ways after the second year; some went for Medicine etc. and some opted for Trichur Engineering College which was nearer for us from Ernakulam District. Three of us, Mrs. Mary George (nee’ Thomas) whose romance (if there was one, that is) with the most silent of our teachers in COET as we used to call what is now known as CET, Dr. T. K. George, was more silent than the birds of Silent Valley and Javed who was known those days as Jawad, the great electronics guru and entrepreneur and I spent our entire university career together until we graduated as engineers.

We all came to COET in 1958. It was in the city those days. The present office complex of the Chief Post Master General, the TELECOM complex, the Priyadarsini Planetarium and Science Museum, the Institute of Management in Government, which was our hostel, the PWD stores and the City High school together formed our campus. We had no place to practise Chain Survey except the University Stadium. As the girls wearing khaki pants walked to the stadium passengers from the occasional city bus peeped out to see these funny creatures who were presumed feminine due to gait and hair(and contours too, I suppose). There was one person who always maintained the body at an angle of ninety degrees to the surface on which the feet rested and somebody easily found a nickname for that person who till date, even after retiring as Chief Engineer, is PERPENDICULAR for us! I never had a taste for engineering and just about managed to scrape through without losing a paper but after I got into the IAS speakers began to enhance my rank in their welcome addresses, higher and higher as the years went by, and when I reached the rank of Chief Secretary one person said my answer books were kept in a glass case in the college. That was about the maximum even I could enjoy and so I said if it were the reason must be to exhibit how poor engineering students get into IAS with high rank! We had good teachers who taught well and treated us with great affection, so much affection that two of our teachers married our classmates! More on my escapades and those of some of my famous classmates, like former DGP Chandran and many others, may be, later.

I feel so happy that we could meet again in Chennai last week.

Note: By Dr.DANIEL BABU PAUL,Alumni CET,IAS,BSc.Engg,MA,FIE,DD
This article was published in CET College Magazine 2007.