| Join Our List | ![Join Our Mailing List]() | | | Dear Srinivasan,
As our newsletter list starts to cross 14,800 names, questions about who should be on it have arisen. The newsletter is meant for IIT Alumni but well-wishers who want to receive it are welcome to sign up too. There is nothing confidential about the newsletter and the incremental cost of a thousand non-IIT alumni is negligible. Feel free to forward this letter to well-wishers of the IITs and they can click the button on the left to join our mailing list, if they wish. However the LinkedIn Group for IIT Alumni, is meant only for those who are graduates of one of the seven IITs or those who are current or former faculty members at these seven IITs. This means that spouses, friends, kids, parents, IIT students, JEE aspirants and others are not intended to be part of this LinkedIn Group. If you find exceptions, do report them to the Group administrator. Double check your own bio on Linked-In and make sure that your complete IIT affiliation is listed. (The Illinois Institute of Technology does not count. As of today, IT-BHU does not count either, although this may change very, very soon). As of now we have 7,784 members on LinkedIn. This issue also has news about a tragic murder of a fellow alumnus in Greater Noida; he was killed in the line of duty. Our hearts go out to Lalit Kumar Chaudhary's wife, son and family. There are two different survey requests in this newsletter, please take a few minutes to respond to each. | Shilpa Shetty, Amartya Sen to speak at Pan-IIT 2008
| | Register online today.
The next global conference for IIT Alumni is set for December 19-21 on the campus of IIT Madras. If the speakers we have mentioned in previous issues have not been sufficient to convince you, the organizers has now announced a yoga session with film star Shilpa Shetty.
The 5'10" Tamil Nadu native was last seen in Apne, a boxing movie with Dharmendra and Sunny/Bobby Deol. She was also the winner of British Celebrity Big Brother in the previous year. ![Shilpa Shetty]()
Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen will also speak. So will the CEOs of Tata Motors, Tata Steel and Tata Consultancy Services. For those who were at the IITs during the 1970's, the organizers have arranged for erstwhile "Dream Girl" Hema Malini to be present.
Discount hotel deals have been arranged, see here for further information. It is important that you register quickly if you want the best hotels deals. (For those purists who object to a photo of Shetty rather than Sen, note that the filmmaker Shekhar Kapur attracted star-struck attention at IIT 2007 in Santa Clara).
| | Rajvanshi pioneers green fuel |
| NARI in Maharashtra, uses sorghum, solar distillation
Dr. Anil Rajvanshi and his colleagues at a rural non-profit organization have pioneered the production of ethanol from sweet sorghum. Rajvanshi chose this plant because it can easily be grown around Maharashtra and because the plant ![Aditya Sheoran]() produces food from its earhead, fuel from its stem and and its crushed stems (bagasse) are excellent animal fodder. Besides, it uses 50% less water than sugarcane and matures in four months as compared to 12 months for sugarcane.
Working at the Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute, the researchers say they created the world's first pilot plant for solar distillation of ethanol. This ethanol is used as a rural household fuel and as a substitute for kerosene; NARI developed stoves and lanterns running on low concentration ethanol. Dr. Rajvanshi says that NARI's hybrid sweet sorghum, Madhura, has been sold all over India and has been exported to France, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, Portugal, Thailand, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals Ltd., (NFCL) Hyderabad has commercialized sweet sorghum for large scale production of ethanol. And NFCL has bought the patents of NARI's ethanol stoves and lanterns. Rajvanshi will be at pan-IIT 2008, which is one more reason to attend and visit Chennai in December.
| | Ray Mehra to Chair 2009 IIT Conference | | ![Ray Mehra]() Take the survey!
Roorkee Alumnus and pan-IIT USA board member Ray Mehra leads a team of volunteers who are busy planning to deliver the next U.S. conference in Chicago, in October 2009.
Ray is the CEO of R Squared Group., a manufacturer automotive, and commercial /residential industries with heat transfer and other metalworking components
The team in Chicago is eager to let YOU influence the content and structure of this event. To provide your feedback, click here. Please take this survey as soon as possible to enable the team to plan accordingly.
| | Alumnus Lynched in Noida | | 47-year-old CEO of auto parts co.
Lalit Kishore Choudhary, Managing Director of Graziano Transmission, died at the company factory in Greater Noida, outside Delhi.
UP police said more than 100 dismissed workers entered the factory, vandalized machinery and attacked Choudhary, a 1983 alumnus of IIT Kanpur. Read the company's press release here . Lalit's friends who saw him at the December 2007 Silver Jubilee Reunion have posted some photos to celebrate his memory here.
Labor Minister Oscar Fernandes create a firestorm of criticism when he said that the killing should serve as a "warning to management". Comments from his former hostel roommate are included in this story.
| IIT Bombay and the Leadership of Innovation
| | ![Anil Kshirsagar, President, IIT Bombay Heritage]() Anil Kshirsagar speaks
In past issues of the this newsletter, you have met each of the members of the current executive commitee of pan-IIT USA. Members of pan-IIT India are listed here.
We now begin a series of interviews with the Presidents of the IIT Alumni Associations in the US, starting with IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation President, Anil Kshirsagar. Excerpts from the the interview are listed below and the full interview is linked on the iit.org website
What is your current professional role?
I am Vice President of Global Strategic Initiatives at TIBCO Software, Inc in Palo Alto, California. I have held various roles in the company - mostly customer facing with a strong technology innovation focus. Most recently, I started TIBCO's India operation in Pune that is TIBCO's second largest Product Development group and also supports world-wide customers.
When did you first get involved in the IIT Alumni affairs?
I have been fortunate enough to get involved in IIT Bombay alumni affairs in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1990. We established the IIT Bombay Heritage Fund in 1996 with the help of a dozen active volunteers from various batches spanning from 1972 (Deepak Sabnis) to 1986 (Sandeep Pandya).
A team of IIT Bombay alumni leaders namely Raj Mashruwala, Victor Menezes, Kanwal Rekhi, Shailesh Mehta, Ram Kelkar, Sandeep Pandya, Mahesh Krishnamurthy, Dushyant Pandya and myself worked with leaders of other IITs in formation of PanIIT.
Key US-based alumni from all over the country such as Arjun Malhotra, P C Chatterjee, Umang Gupta, Desh Deshpande, Rajat Gupta, Sunil Wadhwani, Shail Kumar, Deepak Bhagat, Monishi Sanyal, Sanjeev Sahay, Abhay Bhushan, Partha Ranganathan, Suresh Shenoy, Jude Netto, Gunjan Bagla, and many others were instrumental in bringing credibility to the PanIIT organization; we were joined by Indian alumni leaders such as Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, and Ashank Desai at a meeting hosted by Rajat Gupta of McKinsey & Company, in May 2002 at Stamford, CT.
IIT Bombay's Director recently resigned to take up a position with a US firm (Intellectual Ventures, headed by the former Microsoft CTO). Any comments?
Prof. Ashok Misra will be missed. He was a great leader and brought the much needed external interaction to IIT Bombay. He also provided great leadership at PanIIT level. IITs having become a symbol of innovation in India, he was an easy choice for his new endeavor. This kind of exchange of talent between industry and academia is relatively common in the US. Much needs to be changed at the IITs and India has a long way to go before she becomes a true global leader in this area. However, the fact that it is beginning to happen in India is a sign that India is getting the recognition of leadership in innovation.
Read the full interview here.
| Study: Impact of IIT Alumni
| | IBEF, Vodafone fund online project
Pan IIT India has initiated an interesting study to assess the impact of IIT Alumni. You may participate by enumerating your own impact by clicking here or visiting http://www.impactofiit.org/
Further information about the survey is available at http://www.impactofiit.org/FAQs.html. Please read this before you post information. The study is funded by Vodafone and the India Brand Equity Foundation.
| | Global Business Plan Competition | | IIT Bombay launches 10th Edition
Students and working professionals from anywhere can participate in Eureka!, the Business Plan Competition from IIT Bombay. More details are available here
| | Your stories (with photos) are welcome for future issues of this newsletter, as long as they are relevant to alumni at large. For stories published in the next letter we will pay $100. If we use them on the website only we will pay $50. All material submitted becomes the property of Pan IIT. Please only submit original materials and photos; do not send material whose copyright is owned by others. Self-promoting stories are ok, but not eligible for payment!
From one alumnus to another,
Gunjan
Gunjan Bagla
VP Worldwide Electronic Services, Pan IIT
Kanpur 1978, Author, Doing Business in 21st Century India
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1 comment:
Whoever said Shilpa Shetty is from TN? :-) She is from Mangalore, a Tulu speaking, Bunt gal.......Not that it makes any diff to anyone! I am surprised that this Bollywood bimbo is even a guest at the IIT alumni functions. Will we Indians ever get over the movie madness?
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