JAANA
Jipmer Alumni Association of North America (JAANA) is a public charity organization – EIN# 91-1553777 governed by JAANA Constitution. The Association is organized exclusively for charitable and educational purpose within the meaning of section U.S. 501(c)(3) of Internal Revenue Code.
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History – Origins of the association
M S Vijayarghavan (1967 batch) and Pad S. Krishna (1967 batch) started talking about forming an association of JIPMER alumni in 1988 and they drafted a set of by-laws. The same year George Mathai (1957 batch) sent out an invitation to a whole lot of JIPMER alumni to come to Milwaukee for a gathering of JIPMER alumni. The meeting was called “Gathering of Alumni from Pondicherry (GAP 88)”. About 40 people showed up for the meet in July/August 1988 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, mostly alumni from the first(1956) through the 12th batch(1967). It was at that meeting we JAANA was formally formed. Murali Sivarajan (1962 batch) drafted a Constitution for JAANA and applied to IRS for a non-profit status. After about 6 months and about 200 pages of paperwork, JAANA was designated a charitable 501 c 3 organization contributions to which are tax-deductible. Pushpa Chandwani (1959 batch) was elected Treasurer at the Milwaukee meeting and she has remained in that position till now (2023).
Following the first GAP meeting in Milwaukee, we had the 1st meeting of JAANA in Philadelphia 1989. For the following year (1990), we tried to arrange a 3 day cruise meeting in the Carolina/Florida coast but not many people signed up. So, the President of JAANA at that time (Ramachandran S Nair – 1957 batch) had a meeting of the executive committee in Detroit in 1990 to keep the momentum going, and the committee voted to have the full meeting in Detroit the following year. So the meeting in Detroit in 1991 became the 2nd annual meet of the membership at large. At the 4th meeting in Chicago, we decided that having the meeting every year was difficult and we voted to change the format to once every 2 years (biennial). The 5th Biennial meeting was in Baltimore in 1995.