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Good evening faculty members, staff members, friends and closest to my heart this evening, the graduating class of 2009.

At the outset I would like to thank the third year students for these wonderful arrangements. It’s an honor to be standing here on this podium where some of my idols gave their speeches from here before passing into the history of IIIT-H, and I thank the organizers for this wonderful opportunity.

Today I am not going to give a speech as in the one ‘papa kehte hai beta hamara bada naam karega’. Nor am I looking for votes. I am, instead giving a vote of thanks.

It is hard to believe that, 4 years ago, I first set foot on this campus and in the next two weeks I will be walking out. How time flies! It looks like a blink of an eye! But look closely enough and you will realize how much has happened! There have been ups and downs, achievements and pitfalls, celebrations and mournings and at the end of it, there stand in front of you, 176 lives, and I bet every single one of them, COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED!

We have gained so much from IIIT!

And as we walk out of here, on strong and confident feet, it’s time to take one final look at our lives in IIIT. The lives that we all have lived!

It is also time, to express our appreciation towards those who made it happen.

As a batch, we have several reasons to be proud of ourselves. Students from our batch have had 13 no. of research papers published, the highest by any batch so far in IIIT. The fact that some of these have been in top conferences like CVPR that adds more feathers to our cap. Seven from our B.Tech batch have converted to dual program. Further, around ten B.Tech students will be going abroad to continue their research.

Despite the changed criteria for selection in IIMs, with less preference being given to fresher, our batchmates secured 24 IIM calls, out of which 5 calls got converted. 3 of the B.Tech students have got admission to various IIMs.

Success stories do not end here. Varun Jampani has got an internship in Micsrosoft, Redmond. Sahiti got the Google women engineering award, 5 of our batchmates so far have been selected for Google Summer of Code.

A word about placements. It’s true that our batch placements haven’t been as good as that of our seniors, but we all know, that is because of reasons beyond our control. What is indeed commendable is that despite of the slowdown, our placements have still been better than any other Institute of national repute, with the average salary being offered to the BTech batch crossing the 6.25 Lakh figure.

Students from our batch have won laurels in sports tournaments like Ichathlon, All AP womens TT tournament and CBIT football tournament. We carried forward the different club activities. The new IIIT Rock Band ‘Avante Garde’ owes a lot to the tireless efforts of one of our batchmates, Atul Dwivedi, who had the support of the entire batch with him.

Even among all these achievements there is something in which our batch has stood out. That is, the imagination to think something different, and the guts to take those thoughts to their execution. In totally unprecedented developments, and in this recession period, our batchmates have launched two companies, Pacare and Muse. And it’s not just companies that we have started. Let me introduce you to Samvedana. It is an NGO started only recently by Deepti, Charan and Prateek. It has grown to a community of 146 members and is undertaking several social projects as of now. I am also proud to tell you about Gopal Koduri’s vision 2020, who is working towards providing computing facilities in regional languages.

For you and for me, my dear batchmates, things will never be the same now.

1. There will be no UG4 mailing list to spam.

2. Bhargava, sambhav, piyush will not design another batch t-shirt.

3. Maroo, harsha, and prudhvi will no longer redefine celebrations.

4. There will be no more birthday bumps in the corridors.

5. Satya will not hit another square cut for our batch cricket team.

6. Sainani will no longer be around to defend himself with non-stop PJs.

7. There will be no public news manufactured and broadcasted on gtalk status messages.

8. DJ Ranga won’t perform in any of the DJ nights now.

9. Amit Kabra will not ask you any more doubts.

10. There will be no LAN to play multiplayer games.

11. Never again will Jawahar Sir scare you of a copy case.

12. After tonight, Govindrajulu sir will never remind you the importance of ‘quest for knowledge’.

13. There will be no more coffee shop to sit together for hours.

14. There will be no wing mates, hostel mates, house mates, no more inter batch competitions, inter house competitions, no more Ikka Bikka Cikka grading, no more night out BC sessions, and most importantly, now there will never be hundred doors you could knock on, whenever you wanted to talk.

It’s time to leave, and although we can never repay them enough for their kindness, I would like to make my humble efforts to appreciate all those who made our lives here so fruitful. On behalf of the entire batch, I thank all the faculty members for guiding us through these four years.

I thank all the staff members, for making our lives possible. I thank the Physical Education Department, placements officer, server staff, academic, finance and administrative officers, library staff and hostel administration for so patiently helping us out whenever the need be.

I thank the Security and housekeping staff members for making our lives safe and comfortable. Last but not the least, I have to thank the contribution of the people who run the shops in the campus.

Dear faculty and staff members, batchmates, juniors, it’s time to move on for us, but we’ll all remain in touch in one form of the other. We’ll always remain a part of the great IIIT family.

Let the Banyan tree always guide us all.

Farewell!

Sanket Sharma
25th April 2009
IIIT Hyderabad

PS: I hope I could do justice to all my batchmates and cover every possible achievements and characteristics of our batch. Thanks for all that cheer, I could not ask for anything more.
PS: Special Thanks to Aniket for his valuable inputs.
PS: Friends Goodbye to all of you. We all will miss each other for life long .