Get Together at Toronto

Here is a brief write up of the picnic we had last week.
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The 5th Annual XL Picnic of the Toronto Chapter was planned by veteran alumnus member Munwar Kassim. It was scheduled for July the 15th at noon. Weather wise, it was a gamble - could turn out to be hot, cold or wet. ( Last year was close to a washout - literally) The venue was the Sunnybrook park - well located with good access from all the suburbs.

The day started off bright and sunny - a good sign. Munawar came by the appointed time and planted roots for the group at a comfortable location. The first one hour seemed like the Indian scoreboard in the first few overs ( talking about the 80's). With the day warming up, junta started to roll in. It was an informal kind of a get together - without putting much pressure on the organizers and flexible enough for varying levels of attendance. The final tally was 15 XLers ranging from Dara of the '72 batch to Siddarth Thakur of the '99 batch. Adding spouse, kids and sundry the tally was about 40 people. It has always been interesting to exchange nostalgic moments of the times spent in XL. But added to this was was a component of fading memories and conflicting information. With the earlier batches still talking of Dadu's in the open space outside XL, SBI in the ground floor and the football field and so on. The new batches quickly poured water over all of this (that did not change over the years I guess) - as none of these exist in the same form any more.

Thanks to Bala who had brought a cricket bat and some tennis balls there was some physical activity. (though the size of the bat challenged the tensile strength of the backbones). The group discussed at length as to how the team members should be divided, rules of the game ( interesting -the batsman who scores a boundary not only gets 4 runs, but also gets to fetch the ball ). Finally, the game got going and was interesting to see a six-overs-a-side game played to completion. All the lunch and snacks that was consumed was effectively burnt away. Sans this bat, time would have been spent JLT.

Finally, with one houskeeping task remaining, the group convened to elect the new office bearers. With a lot of enthusiastic participation, it was not difficult elect Bala and Siddarth as the Coordinators for the group. On top of this, many of of us promised to take the intiative and organize more events for the group in the coming year. Let us hope we get to see more action in the coming twelve months.

Attendees at the picnic

Alok Kumar
Balasubramaniam Loganathan
Dara Panth
Ian Hasan
Ian Paul Pinto
Monny Abraham
Munawar Kassim
N Subramaniam
Parneet Bains
Rajdeep Chopra
Sachi Nag
Siddharth Thakur
Suresh P.Karl
Suresh Lakkraj
Tanweer Ahmad