National Institute of Design Alumni | Bay Area

National institute of design’s alumni met the new director Praveen Nahar, to explore the possibility of a NID foundation. It was also great to have guests from IIT foundations as well and listening to their stories of how the Gandhinagar and Kharagpur foundations were formed and defined their purpose.

Second NID Bay Area Meet-up

24 of us met at SonicRim office for over four hours for a white board session. We discussed our values, our competencies, our dreams our concerns and decided to collaborate on building a strong Bay Area NID community.

MP Ranjan: The fire that could never be doused. - By Uday Dandavate

About 20 NID Alumni who attended the National Institute of Design (NID) between 1973 and 2013 met in Mountainview, CA this morning to remember and share our memories of Ranjan.

It became obvious to us that the memories we cherish form a thread that runs through three generations of NID fraternity.

Each of the graduates present expressed a sense of gratitude for Ranjan's mentoring. The first turn for sharing memories of Ranjan went to the most recent graduate. Then we all followed going all the way to the last speaker -Renu Kathail who joined NID in 1973. I was the second last person to express my feelings.

As my turn to speak came, it dawned on me that i viewed Ranjan with an entirely different perspective than others present. To me Ranjan was amongst a very few individuals who kept the core values we inculcated during early years of NID- intact through his entire life, and did not let practical considerations of life dampen his spirit, ideology and curiosity. I recalled how at NID we were taught to first unlearn what we had learned from the established education systems and to approach life with childlike freshness and curiosity. At the NID we learned to challenge status quo, and to serve as catalysts of disruptive innovation. While many of us made adjustments with the establishment as we progressed in our careers, Ranjan remained a non conformist, a radical thinker and a voice of dissent. I had the opportunity to share with Ranjan and other friends a path of co-imagining a vision for design education in India during the Vision First initiative and to provoke imagination of alternative politics and participatory democracy during the India against corruption movement. We became very close because we remained committed to challenging established ideas with radical and creative alternatives. To the agents of establishment, Ranjan remained a thorn in the side, but for those of us who still had the itch to change the world- he remained a spark that kept triggering fire in every mind he nurtured.

The younger graduates were visibly moved by the stories of idealism from early years of NID. We all felt a very strong sense of camaraderie. We decided to continue meeting to keep the fire in the belly burning.