Project Swadesh is the venture to create and develop a dedicated Web 2.0 compliant official social networking website of the school and alumni of my alma mater St. Peter’s, Durgapur. Formerly known as Benachity High School (till 2002,though being 2 kms. away she owes her former name to the biggest bazaar in the district) it’s the oldest institution in the city administered by the Church of North India, and arguably the best school in the crowded Asansol-Durgapur industrial belt educational services market.
The Cause:
Since the days at BHS were drawing to a close in December of 2002, I always dreamt of giving back something to my school. My mother used say if I get to be someone in life, someone with abundant money then I should give some kind of fat donation to my school. Alumni endowments. But hey who said we all have to be filthy rich to give back, right? This is only the start, a small token of our appreciation for all the things our school gave to us, things which’ll stay with us for the rest of our lives.
I’ll be updating on the developments of Project Swadesh here not just to maintain a log of activities but to inform folks associated with the venture regarding “breaking” developments and also many others having interest in seeing this venture succeed.
Work on the project is yet to commence on full scale as university exams, campus job interviews and such trivialities are in full swing.
The following are tentative itineraries of the project.
Phase 1: Recruitment.
Status: Completed.
Members: Me (duh!, batch of ICSE 2003),
Abhinandan Saha (budding engineer, 4th year NIT Jamshedpur, batch of 1CSE 2003),
Subhadip Biswas (budding engineer, Linux geek, code cougar, BCREC Durgapur, batch of ICSE 2003),
Avinaba Banerjee (quiz whiz, medical student, 2nd year, National Medical College Kolkata, batch of ICSE 2004),
Trinath Ghosh (budding engineer, NPTI, Durgapur, batch of ICSE 2003
We’ll add few more members depending on the state of things. It’ll be unmanageable to have a BIG team given the physical distances among ourselves and communication hurdles but given our current numbers we can add about two more.
Phase 2: Blue Print.
The project gang will sit together and develop on the skeleton framework of the plan. The framework and basic design and purpose of the website will be sorted out. We’ll discuss what we can do and what we cannot given our budgetary, time and skill constraints. The tentative date of phase 2 implementation is last week of July but may change if team members are unavailable. July is the team for campus interviews and vocational training for our buddies in engineering colleges.
Phase 3: Content drilling.
Websites are nothing without content. I hope to camp out at Durgapur for at least 10 days from 2nd week of August to mine short bios and requisite info about current and former faculty members, school principals and non-teaching staff. Looks like I’ll be the photographer as we need photos of past and present faculty members.
We also need to talk to school authorities to get permission for some of the ambitious stuff we have in store. Heck, we can’t officially call it “official website” unless the school authorities endorse it. But in the end, there’s nothing official about it.
Phase 4: Web designing and content writing/editing.
It’s now over to the web designing team comprised of Mr. Saha and Mr. Biswas. I have some idea but I know nothing of significance about web design, web content management systems and such technical jargon. I’ll make a point to have at least a working knowledge of such matters after my exams are over by mid July.
Web designing will take time and it’s unclear how much it’ll take. Things will clear out as we progress.
Content writing and editing I’m afraid will fall on me. Not a good idea to do both. We’ll see if we can delegate some of the content writing to a team member. Editing is on me.
Phase 5: Web host delegation, public relations and the Final Go.
The final ordeal is to assign a cheap yet reliable web host which shouldn’t be hard.
Then. The Final unveiling.
Finally we need to let know each and every student of the school and inform all the alumni and teachers that there’s really a place on the cyberspace where they can hang out, a space that gives them a sense of identity and reinvigorates an aura of loyalty, a place where images will allow the visitors to remember who they were, what they were and how they themselves turned out in life. If everything goes well, we can do this when the school opens after Puja vacations in mid-October.
The Deadline:
Our target should be to wrap everything up by mid-October. I believe we’ll all get super busy from mid-November with academics, among other things, and there’s no point dilly-dallying.
Finally,
The purpose of this venture of ours is rooted in pride, love and sense of appreciation and gratitude for the Gurukul. We had the best times of our life in our good ol’ school. We had fabulous teachers (okay we didn’t like all of ‘em then and some gave us really hard times), we forged lifelong friendships and cherished countless moments which will help us regain faith in life and our self when life’s idiosyncrasies and nasty ordeals get us down.
the basic idea of Project Swadesh is giving back. We all have got so much from our school, so much. And for the rest of our lives most of us will get by being selfish rats without giving a thought to show a single sense of gratitude to the institution most responsible besides our parents which made us what we are today. We are not going to be like one of those people and we hope our endeavor would give opportunity and encourage hundreds of alumnis of our school to give back, something, anything, however small that contribution in whatever form that might be.
