The Association of La Martiniere Alumni (Alma) on Saturday appealed to fellow former students to connect and collectively uphold the legacy of the 188-year-old institution.

The thought reverberated several times during a two-hour panel discussion organised by Alma on “The Legacy of Our Founder Major General Claude Martin: Past, Present & Future” at Dalhousie Institute.

“Let us as a collective understand why we are spending an hour and a half or more of our lives this evening sitting here. It is because of... the legacy and heritage,” said Avik Saha, a lawyer from the batch of 1982.

Saha was the first president of Alma and played a key role in setting up the association in 2007.

“The idea of La Martiniere was born 224 years ago when Claude Martin died on September 13, 1800, and his will became alive. It took 36 years for the board to set up the school. In 1836, the school started on March 1 and, after all these years, we have gathered this evening to ask this question: what is our heritage, what is the legacy?”

“Some people have taken away, pardon my words, stolen that heritage from us for their petty ends and needs.... Time has now come for a mass movement and we are the mass,” he said.

The other panellists were lawyers Jishnu Saha (batch of ‘80) and Ranjan Bachawat (batch of ‘82), paediatrician Sharon Ghose (batch of ‘75) and real estate developer Vishal Jhajharia (‘87), the current president of Alma.

The discussion was moderated by I.S. Bhandari, soft skills trainer and life coach from the 1974 batch, who was the school captain in his time.

After the panellists finished, the floor was opened for questions.

A past pupil, Miraj Shah of the 1997 batch, said the “deterioration” of the institution was a recent phenomenon.

“It is in the last 10-15 years that we have seen a steep deterioration and profiteering coming into the school. Today, the school has close to 7,000 (approx) students, ₹1.3 to 1.5 lakh (approx) fees. That’s ₹100 crore collected every year... ₹5 lakh (approx for new admission) fees taken officially.”

Jhajharia in his opening remarks emphasised Alma’s role in preserving the school’s legacy.

“We are not a franchise school. We have a legacy of 200 years which we want to preserve. Alma has been at the forefront of protecting the interests of the school,” said Jhajharia.

He referred to Alma’s intervention when a stairway on the southern side of La Martiniere for Boys that had names of former students engraved on was slapped with marble slabs.

“We had to take steps...and a stop-work notice was issued,” said Jhajharia.