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IIT Alumni Guide
January 2, 2008
Fellow IIT Alumnus,

You have received this newsletter from Pan-IIT because you either attended a pan-IIT alumni event, joined LinkedIn for IIT Alumni, or participated in a chapter activity. If you don't want to be contacted again, or if you wish to change your contact information, please see the links at the bottom of this email.
 
B Santhanam Santhanam chairs Pan-IIT 2008 Global Conference

B. Santhanam is a Distinguished Alumnus (2004) of IIT Madras and Managing Director of Saint-Gobain Glass India. Saint-Gobain is a €40 billion multinational headquartered in France with over 200,000 employees worldwide. Santhanam is currently Chairman of the Indian Glass Association and was one of the founder directors of the IIT Madras Research Park.

Make your plans now to be in Chennai on December 19-21, 2008. An executive committee chaired by Santhanam  is working hard to put on our next global conference. Registration and website details will appear in the months ahead.
 
Battle for the Luxury Auto Brands
Jaguar on hoodAs Ford Motor Company announced that it was ready to sell two of its venerable British luxury brands  (Jaguar and Land Rover)  two of the three lead bidders were Indian companies.

Tata Motors is led by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Ravi Kant and as of this writing appears to be leading the race. The other Indian bidder is Mahindra & Mahindra, whose Chief Operating Officer is IIT Kanpur alumnus, Dr. Pawan Goenka.
 
Alumni Conference Held in Japan

In November 2007, IIT alumni in Japan organized their first ever conference in Tokyo, on the Keio University campus. Here is a short report on the two-day event which attracted attendees from not only from Japan, but from other countries as well.

  "Linked-In" Group for IIT Alumni nears 2000 members
IIT Alumni Logo


Almost two thousand IIT Alumni have joined the official IIT Alumni group on LinkedIn since its launch a few weeks ago. The group now has more alumni than all the individual IIT groups put together. Read on if you have not joined yet.

Do you need to connect to other IIT Alumni for professional reasons? Could your company or organization benefit by hiring more alumni from the IITs? Are you thinking about a job or career change? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should apply to join the official IIT Alumni group on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an online, professional-oriented networking service that strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts. Using the service you can find past and present colleagues and batchmates quickly. Over 30,000 IIT Alumni are already registered on LinkedIn. In order to apply to join, you must first fill out a profile about yourself that includes (at the very minimum) the specific IIT that you graduated from, the year, and the degree. It takes several days for your request to be reviewed.

For third-party opinions on the value of free LinkedIn services read About.com and Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Computer Evangelist.

To join the IIT Alumni Group on LinkedIn, start by clicking here.

 
Endnote: "It's All relative..."

Grandmother was pretending to be lost in prayer, but her prayer-beads were spinning at top speed. That meant she was either excited or upset. Mother put the receiver down. "Some American girl in his office, she's coming to stay with us for a week." She sounded as if she had a deep foreboding. Father had no such doubt. He knew the worst was to come. He had been matching horoscopes for a year, but my brother Vivek had found a million excuses for not being able to visit India, call any of the chosen Iyer girls, or in any other way advance father's cause.

Read on

Viji is an IIT Madras alumnus. (If you have not seen the Mastercard "priceless" television advertisements, visit priceless.com for context)


We welcome ideas on how to improve this newsletter. Services on iit.org and on this newsletter are intended to benefit IIT Alumni worldwide regardless of their country of residence or the IIT that they graduated from. If you wish to volunteer to help with the newsletter or the website, send an email with the subject line "volunteer" and some details about yourself and your specific interests.
  
Gunjan Bagla
Kanpur 1978
Vice President, Alumni Electronic Services
Pan IIT USA