Monthly Archives: February 2019

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Share a memory, tell us about yourself

Let us know about your time at BCS, how it made a difference and shaped your life. Share your experiences for other OCs to read and also for Boys at BCS to be able to relate to. We’d like to hear from you about your life experiences, your travels, achievements, news and anything of common interest to other OCs [with your permission of course]. Got married? Had a child? Changed jobs or moved to a new city? We’d love to hear! Have a class photo? Send it in!

Tell us where you are

We constantly request all Old Cottonians to join the OCA Mailing List and to update it as and when you move location or change your contact number etc. This will help the OCA in keeping you informed about news, new posts and events. The form is available at the main page of the OCA Website from where you can sign-up or change your address, email and contact details. To update your contact details, just enter the form with the existing email address and you should be able to then update anything that has changed. The Privacy Policy is also listed via the link above.

Gerald [Jerry] Godinho interviews Old Cottonian ROHAN CHARANJI

Gerald Godinho [also an Old Cottonian] interviewed Rohan Charanji. Here is an excerpt [see below for link to full interview].
THE FUTURE OF HOSPITALITY: ROHAN CHARANJI.

Rohan, welcome to my series on Millennials. Tell my audience something important about you?

“I was born in India, educated at Bishop Cotton and studied in Switzerland and London.

I have worked in China, US, London, Thailand, Wales and currently in the UAE for the last 4 years.

With my Swiss education, I felt a stupid sense of entitlement. I was asked to mop floors, clean plates and I realized without hard work you can never achieve anything.”

– Rohan Charanji.

[…read the full interview here]

I imagine…

I imagine ….

“The thing I imagine myself being in the future doesn’t exist yet” as I know there is a check list of unfinished business that I need to do in today’s world before I enter the lofty gates of tomorrow’s future.

My elders always talk about “those good old days, those golden days” when time moved at an intelligent pace, a slow wonderful pace. It was a time where every meal was a slow ritual; when every meal was home cooked and my elders enjoyed both culinary delights and healthy conversations. A letter from my Grand Father that took weeks to arrive with the postage stamp of a dancing Peacock was the best happening of the day; the envelope was slit open with a beautiful paper cutter and all around the table stretched their necks with eyes wide open to stare in awe at the beautiful calligraphy on ivory paper, the style of grammar and news from the provinces where the folks lived…

Today the rapid pace is a never ending race against time, levels of stress have reached another dimension. Where the average time spent looking at the screen of a mobile smart phone is three hours a day; it’s not the want of food, nor drink to quench your hunger but the desperation to inform your million face book friends about your every move( friends? really…?).
To quench their thirst with electronic jargon, not whole wheat bread and a thick slice of cheese; the latter is a minority against the power of the mobile that controls our lives.

But enough is enough. 

For me to enter the lofty gates into the future will only happen if I can garner both knowledge and global awareness on working collectively, to slow down our pace, reduce our workloads, and align the Weather Gods to perform their tasks with logical clarity. I want the four seasons to be fantastically beautiful, I want to make sure every weekend is utilised to its fullest with a connect to the great outdoors, away from steel traffic, pollution, abnormal heat and dust, so I can cross the street and all traffic will stop for me, not run over me, where overtime in a Business Process Outsourced office is abolished and the lights switched off at 5.00pm. Where the world dances to happy tunes and I see a green garden where my grand parents look at me as I walk “ slowly “ towards them..
knowing I have so much time to expend on feel, touch and smell, lying on my back to see white fluffy clouds sailing against a blue sky.

In Bishop Cotton School my Head Master R.K von Goldstein read Shakespeare which related to life’s various quests … hope, dreams, love , romance and even gruesome murders and death ..so I could think about what I should expect moving forward, questions that needed to be disseminated and understood with clarity which we expressed in slow soft clear English writing with Doric Pens dipped in Quink ink..

It’s the simplicity of life that I will strive to achieve in my world today so my children enjoy a more beautiful futuristic world tomorrow. Only then, only then.

*****

(Vivek) Bhasin
Lefroy 1961-1970