THE GENESIS AND EVOLUTION OF THE ROTARY CLUB OF MADRAS WEST.
The Rotary Club of Madras West was chartered on 15th October 1965. We were the third club in Chennai ( Madras)- The Madras Club in 1929, Madras South in 1960 . In between there was the Rotary Club of Vellore in 1947, which was part of our district till recently.
In the early days, Rotary place a lot of emphasis on the four pillars of club administration- Subscription, Attendance, Classification and Territory. A Rotary club was supposed to have at most two members of the same classification. ( We always got around this by making many sub classifications!). Prof. S.R.Govindarajan, a physics professor at Loyola and a member of the South club, shifted to D G Vaishnav College at Arumbakkaman thus could not continue as a Rotarian since he fell outside the Territory. He prevailed upon Governor K.V. Srinivasan( Standard Motors) and the then President of Madras Club, Rtn M.V. Arunachalam ( TI group) to start a new club and thus was born RCMW.
Prof. SRG was the charter president with Rtn .Sankarakrishnan(Kutty flush doors) as the charter secretary. Most members were from Ambattur, Anna nagar, Kilpauk areas. Being a club of Engineers( and a few doctors and others) , RCMW brought in a lot of best practices in systems and application.
Those days Rotary was not in favour of long term commitment projects. RCMW was an exception. We established the Thiruverkadu Medical Centre in 1972 and it is still the bedrock of our community service projects after 50 years. Many programmes in Community service, Vocational and youth services( interact) were started and are still going strong. An Achilles heel was the Rotaract club. We could never get our Rotaract club in full swing.
We were quite active in the district, with two district governors- SRG in 1975-76, and Bhoja Shetty in 1982-83. Our in house programs were excellent, so much so that after 1983 we retreated into a shell as far as the district was concerned. It took another 25 years when our quintessential and ubiquitous Rotarian Subramaniam ( Popularly known as Subu) became the Governor in 2008-09, closely followed by the ambitious, philanthropic Raja Seenivasan in 2012-13.
Some of the hallmarks of RCMW was the Westerly and Family participation. Imagine 47 years of 52 westerly issues posted every Tuesday at the Egmore post office. Add this to “ No windows, excel, whatsapp, no mobiles even “ and the effort involved. We won so many awards, that at one point we refused to take part in the district bulletin awards. The Anns and Annettes were a source of great strength. One of them ( Rekha Shetty) went on to become the District Governor in 2000-2001.
But RCMW doesn’t just sit on old laurels. We have always reinvented ourselves and even today we are a force to reckon with in this part of the Rotary world of Dist 3232 that we Proudly belong. After the bifurcation of the dist 3232 into 3233 and 3234, Madras West became the oldest club with a 60yr legacy part of Dist 3233.