Four decades is a very long time.
Careers are built, families grow, friends disperse and cross oceans. Carefree days of college and camaraderie become that odd ‘Happy Birthday’ message, if we remember.
But the one thread can bridge this distance is an alumni association. All it takes is a few friends in a distant land gathering together to reminisce about the good old days over a cup of chai and end up inadvertently setting up what would become a testament to friendship.
This is the story behind MAMCOAANA Chronicles – (Un)Matched Since 1985.
What began at Maulana Azad Medical College travelled far beyond its corridors. Maulanians moved across cities, countries and continents, with many eventually making America home. The geography changed. The friendships did not. Maneesh Media’s challenge was to capture four decades of them.
Where is the archive?
No, there wasn’t. There was a website. There were newsletters, but there was no ‘cohesive’ archive. It existed in neatly stored boxes, handwritten notes, and in memories of the people themselves, who were scattered across continents.
In Step the Detectives
Three Maulanians became the anchors of this extraordinary exercise, coordinating, collecting and helping piece together a history that had never been intended to become history.
Slowly, forty years began finding their way into folders. Then came a deceptively difficult question: who, when, where? The work became part storytelling, part investigation.
Making Forty Years Fit
Memories clashed and differed; photographs had to be identified; captions prepared, stories edited. By the time we were ready to send it to our creative team, we realised everything was competing for space. How does one make 40 years fit? The challenge was not simply deciding what went into the book. It was deciding what could possibly be left out.
The Onus of Getting Things Right
An alumni book cannot belong to one person. It must belong to everyone equally. And this made our task even more important. Maneesh Media’s role was to take thousands of individual memories and allow them to speak in one voice — without losing the personalities that made them individual in the first place.
The Reward of Appreciation
If one moves away from the terms and jargons, one could describe this as a scrap book for adults. It is a lesson in how to keep old friendships alive. It is reliving a time of your life where ‘ups’ were more fun with friends and the ‘downs’ more bearable with them.
The finished labour of love has brought joy to every Maulanian, and we have received and continue to receive adulation every day. That is our reward – A job well done.
MAMCOAANA Chronicles is also a personal milestone for Maneesh Media. It is our 75th publication in our own decades-old journey of documenting people, communities and legacies.
The process was not just a discovery of MAMCOAANA, it was also charting a map – through the latitudes and longitudes of memories, togetherness, and bonding. It was the map of friendship. It left us questioning ‘What was stopping us from creating our own?’