Birth of SMITAA

On a fine day of August 1998, Mr. Jawahar, the Secretary of MIT Alumni Association (from Chennai), visited Singapore in connection with MIT's Golden Jubilee celebrations, spreading the message and collecting the support for the event, from all over the world. He approached MITians here to gather a group of MITians so that he can address them about the MIT Golden Jubilee Celebrations. Mr. Sundar, Mr. D. Ravi, Mr. Karthikeyan and Mr. Vasudevan mobilized about 40 MITians Mr. Jawahar was delighted to see a huge turn out of Singapore MITians for the meeting and he suggested to start an association to keep things moving.

In the very same meeting, a committee was ushered in with the spontaneous support of a few volunteers. Mr. Shankaran as the President, Mr. D. Ravi as the Vice-President, Mr. Sundar as the Secretary, Mr. S. Ravichandran as the Treasurer, Mr. VC Venkatesan and D. Karthikeyan as the committee members, became the pioneer members of the Singapore MITAlumni Association. A suitable name was given as SMITAA (Singapore MIT Alumni Association). Thus Mother MIT gave birth to SMITAA.

To sum up, it was all a noble suggestion of a visiting MITian and a good TEAM effort by the members here, that helped create the association.

Every member has been contributing in his / her own way to help grow SMITAA. We shall publish about the growth of SMITAA in our future SMITAAZINE editions, providing details about the excellent contributions of the previous executive committees.

On behalf of all the SMITAA members, we acknowledge, salute and thank the efforts of all the members who were behind the formation of SMITAA.