University Convocation Address – What it should not be.

I am one of the lucky/unlucky few who, despite having 3 degrees to my (dis)credit, have never attended his convocation.

Over the past three years, I have had the unfortunate opportunity to attend two convocations and heard an academic and an entrepreneur delivering the addresses. Oh, how I feel for the graduates, for whom that must have been the highest of the highlights of their life thus far.

In the first of the two addresses, this one by the academic, the focus was on how teaching must be done. There was not a word about the kind of world the new graduates will be facing or how different the new phase of life would be compared to what they have been exposed thus far. No, not a single word. The “Orator” (yes, that is how pompously he was addressed), for all he cared could have delivered in full Mark Antony’s speech and the audience would have been none the wiser.

The second address, this one by the entrepreneur, was all about how people are “funneled” away from their soil. The point was that the students are “escaping” the rural ambience (outside of the compound walls of the institutions) to reach out to greener (money, prestige, status etc.) pastures instead of making rural pastures greener. He went on to talk about how his company is doing this and that. It was much about his company and very little about anything else, including the new graduates.

It was when the useless segment “Vote of Thanks” was being delivered, the orator ostensibly felt the serious omission of focusing on the students in his speech. He signaled to the speaker at the lectern and rushed to it and said a sentence or two of how, when he comes back the next time (arrogance personified or self-invitation, your choice), he would hear that at least a few from the current student audience would have become entrepreneurs. I felt that he should have kept quiet and no one (excepting yours truly) would have noticed his omission. But such thoughts are far from the blinders-on thinking of those who have “made it”. Unfortunately, it is this same set of people who are called to deliver convocation addresses.

A Trumpian “SAD” is not out of place here.

Raghuram Ekambaram

P.S I do not know who delivered the convocation addresses for my graduating classes and I am unable to decide whether I was lucky or unlucky