Through the mid-80s and early 90s, Chennai Central witnessed a strange sight once a year. Hundreds of young men, lugging suitcases and backpacks, would congregate on Platform Number 1 in the late hours of a July night, waiting for the Tamil Nadu Express to pull in. Amidst many hi-fives and much back-slapping, there’d be a mad scramble for seats as the shrill whistle blew. It never really mattered who sat where though, for with almost 700 engineers-in-the-making headed to a remote town in the middle of a desert near Delhi for college, the train was theirs for merrymaking over the next 32 hours.
For author L. Suresh, this annual ritual marked the beginning of the four years that changed his life as a civil engineering student of BITS Pilani. It is this journey that he takes readers on in his debut book The Pilani Pilgrims (Notion Press).
The book traces two timelines, the first of nine alumni who head back to college for a reunion, their memories often harking back several decades, and the second, of a college fresher in 2010, cautious about starting life anew in a faraway place. As their stories slowly unfold toward each other, they finally converge for a big reveal. “Pilani, to me, was this mystical, almost paradise-like place, and BITS, surrounded by desert all around, had its own optic-fibre network, its own Internet backbone, with never a water problem, never a power cut, lush lawns and peacocks for company,” says Suresh. It is this ethos that lets him couch the story in terms of reverence — Pilani as the site of pilgrimage, and the alumni trekking back in time, as pilgrims. Nostalgia certainly frames this story, but Suresh says, it is as much about friendships forged that last lifetimes, and the discovery of passions that lead to your true calling.
The last is true for Suresh himself, who came to author-hood the long-winded way. Far before he joined college, Suresh harboured the desire to become a writer. But the lack of choice back then, ensured he enrolled in a professional course. He made up for this by spending his years there writing, editing, printing and publishing for the college magazine, association journals and press clubs. “I remember our typeset process with presses manned by hard-core Rajasthanis who knew not a word of English. They understood letters like kindergarten children do, in standing, sleeping and curved lines. So we’d spend entire nights at the press proofing page after page, till we arrived at the zero-error copy.” This rigour stood Suresh in good stead through his brief stint at Hewlett Packard, 10 years in advertising and another eight years as a freelance branding consultant. The plot of The Pilani Pilgrims story lay on the backburner all along though, but after 14-hour days of writing for work, Suresh found that fatigue trumped creativity when he sat down to write his book. A year ago, though, he finally gathered his guts and quit. “With no job and the fear of God in me, this book wrote itself in nine months.”
But debut books in this age of the Indian publishing boom are, as Suresh puts it, like abandoned orphans. The answer to this plight he found in Steve Jobs’ ‘Connecting The Dots’ commencement address. “I realised that as an engineer and technology writer, I knew how to leverage technology to my advantage; through advertising I’d honed my writing skills for various needs and as a consultant, I’d done the branding for numerous products and companies. Because my experiences had been lateral, not linear, I could draw from all of it for this book.”
So off came the writer hat, and on came the ad-man hat. “AIDA,” he says. “Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. That’s what will make people pick up the book.” His 45-day campaign and communication plan took off on August 1, BITS alumni day, and spans promotion efforts on social media and elsewhere, targeted first at the captive ex-BITSian readership and eventually the larger public. “You don’t need insider know-how to get this book,” says Suresh, “Anyone who’s ever been to college will enjoy this story.”
