Time to pick up the spade

Hello again,

Lets call a spade a spade. This blog didnt acheive its objectives. It was meant to be a shared resource that spoke about informal events on campus. The dream was that there would be someone on the residential part of the campus, perhaps a young budding journalist, some student from the other part of the campus, and some faculty and staff who would write about informal events on the campus. A way of putting our life online.

But I should have realised that (i) I dont have the connections to make it happen and (ii) the very idea is against the XL tradition of secrecy (Freemasons come to mind). There was a time when email was a popular medium and the first wave passed through campus when someone sent an anonymous mail around, the author called herself (to use the polically correct word) "the soul of xlri". There was a lot of trying to guess or outguess who owned the soul of xlri (at least the email account). Thankfully no witches were burnt.

That was until Blogsphere brought about its own witch hunt. This time it was the senior batch up in arms against the junior batch for having leaked out "hallowed traditions". There were many chinks in our armour before that too. There was a group of alumni who put together an XL Advisory Board (XLAB), who provoked a door slam in their own faces for "interfering too much".

So I too started getting used to the idea that one hears about news of XLRI from the news papers. I set up a google alert on XLRI so I could know what my own institution was upto, what I got was mostly junk about events taking place at the XLRI auditorium, but I also got information about about some XL aluminium....oops sorry alum... or alumnus speaking somewhere.

In the meanwhile, the next best thing happened, the "X- Factor", an online magazine by the students who wanted to reach out across and send a message to space like the spaceship "voyager". Students being smarter than me, did a much better of job of it than this blog.

Hence it is time for me to pick up the spade and dig deep and bury this blog. An earlier attempt to retire this blog brought cries of indignation and a few students actually said they might be interested. Things haven't really moved since then. Perhaps...who knows, from that spot another sapling may send up a shoot, that might grow into a tree. If only we had the power to make things grow. We don't. The only thing we can do is to plant seeds and water the land, the growth has to happen.

"......for it is in giving that we receive,
........and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life"
________ By a wierdo that dressed in coarse clothes and hung around with animals.