Personal Diary © Burhan Rasool

[Continued from Part 8]

…

Within a few months Affan Butt resigned and Umar Suleman took over. He asked me to become his General Secretary; to which I agreed with a condition that Farid would be Vice President. He agreed even with all his disagreements with Farid.

He agreed on relationship development with Board of Governors (BoGs) & the Dean, even though he disliked their way of management to the core of his heart, and being the victim himself of their ad-hoc rules & policies.

And so we began to work as a team, with meetings upon meetings, planning out future course of action. And soon we began the implementation of our plans.

We sent invitations to all the Board members for the upcoming homecoming, keeping in mind that the Rector would come only if he is sent the invitation a month in advance. And so we sent out invitations both electronically and by post.

The first one (and perhaps the only one) to reply was the Dean. And he said, he would not be available for the homecoming. Built on that email reply I requested a 1-on-1 meeting instead, to which he agreed. I sent him the following minutes of the meeting, to which he said, “I think that minutes of the meeting stated below, give a good reflection on the matters discussed.“:

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Atendees: Burhan Rasool, Adnan Umer and Dr. Ayub Alvi

Date: January 21, 2006
Duration: 1 hour (approx)

After initial chit chat (i.e what OSAF has been doing and what it aims to do in future), Ayub Sb gave the following guidelines:

1. Institutionalize OSAF Activities.
   In this regard:
   i) Introduce OSAF Membership (with life-time fee and annual fee to generate office funds). It should be obligatory on each member to give a percentage (0.5, 1 or what ever) of his/her salary to OSAF.
   ii) Alumni Network database having current contact info, plus job details etc. For that 3 things will be required.
   —An Office
   —An Office Worker
   —A phone line
   The budget of which can be generated from membership fee and other ways (notebooks, tea-cups etc.)
2. Compliment your efforts with that of the University’s and do not overlap.
   In this regard:
   i) Develop the Book Bank for the needy, having contributions from Alumni in the form of books.
   ii) Assistance regarding accommodation (and may be the food expenses), especially for those coming from smaller cities.
   iii) Support cases wherein the CGPA falls just below 2.0 (say 1.99 or 1.98 etc.) and the student can recover but the University’s financial support is no more. Plus counseling him/her as to how many and what courses he/she should take.
   iv) The university will give space in its admissions’ ad in the newspaper.
3. Broaden OSAF to other campuses, having such chapters in each campus, with independent governing bodies.
4. Ayub Sb agreed to have the follow-up meeting whenever he comes to Lahore for the Convocation this year.

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It was in this meeting that I first came across severe hatred for You-Know-Who in the head office (as mentioned here and here)

But anyways, as far as OSAF was concerned this meeting was a major breakthrough and an important milestone was achieved.

[... Continued here]