HP Alumni’s 15th GALA Dinner — Friday 4 November 2016

It’s that time of year  again when we are about 4 months away from the most awaited event in the HP Alumni calendar – the annual Gala dinner.

This year the theme “Around the World in 80 Days” was picked in cognizance of the role technology has played in our lives, making the world a much flatter and interconnected place .

It may have taken Phileas Fogg and his valet in the Jules Verne novel 80 days to circumnavigate around the world.

In the 19th century,  the technological innovations had opened the possibility of rapid circumnavigation and the prospect fascinated Verne and his readership. In particular three technological breakthroughs occurred in 1869-70 that made a tourist-like around-the-world journey possible for the first time: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869).

It was a notable mark in the end of an age of exploration and the start of an age of fully global tourism that could be enjoyed in relative comfort and safety. It sparked the imagination that anyone could sit down, draw up a schedule, buy tickets and travel around the world, a feat previously reserved for only the most heroic and hardy of adventurers.

Today, with the Internet at our fingertips, high availability of budget airline flights and all the workings of the collaborative economy, another frontier has yet been created .. the most exotic of tour destinations,  the myriad of information and sighting of places, cultures, and food come available to the traveller whether experientially or…. just being on a couch ..

Come join us on November 4th , as we take a spin .. ( in about 80+80 plus minutes!) We will have fun around the globe including – the best dressed contest (in national/cultural costumes) and  bringing live to you,  a performance  Bian Lian  “changing faces” , of the famous Sichuan opera which originated during the Qing dynasty in the 1700s.