Yearbooks are a fairly recent phenomenon in Indian Campuses.Before yearbooks,it was slam books which ruled over all the campuses.Then yearbooks replaced them by collating the information of the entire batch in a booklet.But in today's era of social media,they have in a way have become redundant.Well,this post doesn't intent to discuss the relevance of yearbooks but rather discuss the crazy stuff that goes into it!
In my engineering yearbook,each person had to write about what his philosophy of life is and what he would remember the most about the college.People used to copy some catchy lines from internet and paste it in the yearbooks.Banal statements like "I believe in "Work hard..party harder' ...I believe in "Working hard..honestly..respecting elders..bla bla bla..Strangely such statements used to come from people who actually didn't even work hard or party..just wrote for the sake of it.The design of the yearbooks used to be very rudimentary.In our days,even a guy with basic knowledge of Photoshop used to be dubbed as "Design Guru'.Things have changed a lot these days with the popularity of SLR cameras and social media whereby more people are taking up designing.Using photoshop, people make even a street dog look royal and beautiful :)
The B-schools yearbooks are much different from that of engineering ones.The design is outsourced to some specialized firms who are into the business of designing and printing.As any other activity in business schools,even this doesn't come cheap.It does cost a bomb to design and print yearbooks for the entire batch.The designs are much fancier than the engineering ones but they aren't changed every year.Even the introductory words by the top administration of the institute is the same every year.The content of the yearbook comprises of testimonials that your batch mates write about you.These testimonials are much boring than the content of what you see in the engineering yearbooks.People write the same crap for all!
Girls have starting lines like "She is a happy-go-lucky girl spreading happiness all around her and bailing humanity out of gloom and morose"
Other banal statements would be " She is beauty with brains...don't get fooled by her tough demeanour..she is like a tender child from inside"
Guys would have statements like "He is a honest..harworking and believes in high thinking..low living...most eligible bachelor in the batch....a perfect connoisseur of good food..Tom Cruise looks bla bla bla..."
Slam books in schools did a much better job as the person filling it was much more candor about the person to whom the slam book belonged.When the stuff gets distrubuted with the entire batch,it's when it all starts get boring!
The truth is when you turn the pages of yearbook and go through the pages of your batch mates,they look all the same..like the candles burning at the altar of a church!!
