The MCC Coda

Some were purposefully striding aro­und the sprawling campus, cameras at the ready, as if hoping to recapture something behind a bush, in a culvert, under a tree, down a corridor or around a corner. Some wore the smug, almost beatific, I-have-arrived look. Others had their faces, after the fifth or so uncertain encounter, kind of permanently screwed in a quizzical “I recognize you but can’t place you. Can you jog my memory?” routine.

And there were those—god bless them, the rambunctious lot—who cut through the clutter with their infectious merry-making. They were all youthful, even if, merely in terms of the number of years lived on earth, they were for the most part middle-aged and upwardly, variously immobile. The oldest registration was from the 1946-49 batch.

So what does it take to get nearly 1,500 assorted individuals from the city, the rest of India and from different parts of the world—including the US, Canada, UK and Europe, Australia, Mauritius, Malaysia, Sin­gapore, Sri Lanka, the Gulf, Hong Kong—to converge on Tambaram on the outskirts of Chennai over a muggy weekend in July and cavort around in blissful bonhomie?

The strange allure of MCC.

About the oldest in Asia, dating back to 1837, the Madras Christian College was reawakening to a global reunion call, spread more by word of mouth and the social media than the mainstream press, and picked up, like some urgent call to arms, by alumni scattered across the world. It was at once heartwarming and bizarre to see past and present political leaders, ministers, lawyers, judges, academics, supercops, filmmakers, actors, artists, media barons, hacks, corporate honchos, white, blue and other collars and those who couldn’t care less about any of the above, all of them leave their titles, egos and chips on their shoulders at the gate and dissolve into the nirvanic oneness of MCC-iteness.

The structured events, much like life remembered on the campus, spanned the gravitas-to-levity range, from the intellectually sublime to the skittishly ridiculous. But the parallel narrative, experienced rather than expressed, was more about imbibing the spirit, breathing in the air, of those old times. And like old times, the spirit was imbibed in good measure and what was breathed in had more substance to it than abstract air....