(Stepping up to mike)
This is an old habit. I'll start by saying "Check!"

Thank you, sir, and thank you everyone who thought I'd make a worthy speaker for the very first student speech at Reflections.

I'll start by fishing out my speech. (removing papers from pocket)

I remember writing about being asked to be the very first student to speak at Reflections, and I wrote the following: "I'm too young to be honoured. I'm just kicked. In a nice humble kind of way."

Like I've said, thank you once again. I'm sure this will go on to be a pleasure.

When I first thought about what it is that I would like to speak about, I knew one thing for certain - I was not going to speak about IIT, about technology, or about college education. Because we've done more than our fair share of that. I wanted this speech in some sense to reflect upon the fact that my state of mind, and that, I hope, of at least a quarter of us here, is such that we're getting ready to leave campus. We're leaving the safety of this haven, of these confines, for a world where our alleged brilliance no longer shields us from all its cruelty and variety and all its hard truths. We're getting ready to re-enter the world, and that is what I wanted to talk about.

Now, we've all been through life. Fair amount of it. We've been in school, ten to twelve years. Well, it was mostly black and white. There were good kids, bad kids, spoilt kids, nice kids, dost (showing thumb up), not dost (showing little finger up), good teachers, bad teachers. It was all black and white. And we learnt so much in that time that a large part of it, given as young as we were at the time, was taken for granted.

Then we've gone through life in our capacity as just ordinary kids. We've gotten on and off running buses. We've walked the streets, we've seen poverty struggling to be noticed through tinted windows of air-conditioned cars.

And yet, when at the age of twenty-one, we have to step forward to talk about anything with any amount of authority, it turns out IIT is the only thing on our minds. I wouldn't blame any of us, really. In many ways, IIT is the first major life experience that we've had. It is the first episode - major episode - of our lives that we've lived out as discerning adults, understanding, or at least trying to understand what it is that we were going through.

And I feel it's only right that when we leave this place, we give some attention to the world that awaits us - that immediately awaits us.

This speech, initially, was to be titled Arming an Unshielded Mind. I meant to talk about the thoughts with which I arm this mind of mine, preparing it for a life, where it is no longer shielded by the barriers of this campus. Think about it. We've been here, or we will have been here - the remaining three-fourths of us - for four or five years, during which time we've remained so comfortably, so very cheerfully, cut off from everything about the outside world. We've known its headlines, but were, for the most part, untouched by everything else. Untouched by its crime. By the police, equally. Untouched by its politics. And by its politicians, who normally would make it their business to come around searching for fresh talent, looking to breed the next generation of criminals for their cause. We've remained cut off. We've remained safe. How is it, then, that we return to that world now?

We're twenty-one. We have a whole lot of things to think about. It's never easy being right about most things. We've all grown through the time we first became adolescents, started to think about a lot of things. Every moment of my life, as I recollect, I've stopped to think about what an idiot I used to be a year ago, and then felt mighty good about how much less of an idiot I am in the present. This has been happening for way more than eight years, if I remember. By that token, I should believe I'm old enough, I've seen enough, I know enough.

I'm old enough, as the law tells me. And yet, every now and then some strange little thing happens - the strangest, little, thing happens - that puts me in my place and reminds me that I'm just twenty-one. I'm twenty-one, I might say, but till date, whenever my father flies, which is very often, he saves a toffee for me. Now that is a very humbling thought. It reminds me that I have a long way to go before I become this person, he's here actually (pointing out my father in the audience), a long way before I hold my firstborn in my hands, and an even longer way before I start to save up toffees from my flights for him. (Note: An unimportant factual flaw that I must point out as an afterthought: I am not my father's firstborn. I'm the younger of two brothers!)

What is the big deal about being twenty-one? About being on this threshold and about having all these confusions? People have been here before, haven't they? By the millions, by the billions. They've all had their confusions. And they all went on to make rather good lives for themselves. All you've got to do is go with the flow. And those are the words we hear. And those, are precisely the words I fear: going with the flow, making good lives for ourselves. It may be fine for the masses to go with the flow, to go follow this template model of existence that has been handed down to them. It's not very unreasonable that the world expects a little more of us. It expects that we make a little more than just good lives for ourselves. If we're willing to lap up all the praise that comes our way, all of that alleged brilliance I earlier spoke about, I think we should be equally willing to accept their expectations. We're expected, I repeat, to do a lot more than just make good lives for ourselves.

The way I see it, we are standing over the top of a cliff, and we happen to look down upon that flow that everyone talks about jumping right into. There is a problem. If you jump right into that flow, it's going to be horribly difficult to come back to this view of the world, this view of life ahead of you. You never know what it might be that you're jumping into. It could be a herd of wildebeest stampeding across the savannah, running away from a predator. It could be a herd of lemmings running across the arctic waiting to do their mass suicide ritual and jump into the sea. The point is, if you want to return, you never will be able to. Which is why I believe it is important for us, at this juncture, to think about the questions that lie in front of us.

My speech was initially to be titled Arming an Unshielded Mind, I told you that. It was changed because O2 (pointing to O2 in the audience) here thought it would be prohibitively abstract. I'm going to talk about arming our minds for a world where we're no longer shielded.

I'll start by underscoring the importance of a term I'm going to be rather sketchy about - I'm not going to get into the details of my understanding of it, because for all I know, my understanding of it is not too good; quite sure it isn't good, in fact - philosophy. I believe that we need to straighten our ideas out in life - those especially on the more fundamental questions - in the beginning.

I believe it makes sense to mimic, in our own lives, the order of evolution of humanity at large. Think about it. Humanity started out addressing these very basic questions about who we are - where do we go after we die - I'm not speaking of that particularly. Who are we? What is our purpose here on earth? And then we went on to add all these other layers - an understanding of society, of politics; the development and perfection of the arts, sciences, engineering, technology, whatever it might be. I believe it makes sense for us, similarly, to start with the few fundamental questions, not find the answers to them, obviously, but at least to ask them so that we know what we're looking for, and then march on to add these other layers in our lives.

I could be wrong here, but I believe that if you start somewhere else, if you jump right into that flow and go on just thinking about your engineering or whatever else it might be that is your calling in life, and then return to these fundamental questions, it counts in some sense as regression, not so much as evolution. I like to think that philosophy is not so much a refuge - it isn't a way of dealing with your mid-life crisis or a way of dealing with your retirement. It has got to be the fundamentals on which you start out with your life.

We need to stop to think while we're still on that cliff - take a break, literally, from rushing everywhere that we need to be when we're twenty-one and twenty-two and twenty-three and twenty-four and even twenty-five. We need to stop and crumple that mass printed itinerary that we're being handed down. We need to just sign off this package tour - this guided tour - of life. That's for the masses, who seek security and safety in numbers in everything they do. It's upon us to be a little different - to not fear experimentation, because it's only through experimentation that new ideas emerge. And it's only from new ideas that humanity eventually progresses.

And it is our duty, whether or not in our capacity as IITians, to take humanity forward in quite the same way that the very select group of people, very much like us, did in the past - in their time. Progress has always been the work of a few people, not everyone.

In any case, I was saying we need to think differently. We need to question indoctrination. Never mind if people go with the flow and have this certain body of wisdom with them. It may take you twenty or thirty or forty years to reach the same conclusions. But I think it's a little more meaningful if our lives - if those twenty or thirty or forty years of our lives - go into forming those opinions rather than verifying them. I think it makes more sense that way.

Where does this arming begin? What is it that we need to think about and sensitise ourselves to? I've spoken about the importance of philosophy. Now, although I said I was going to be rather sketchy and escapist about it, I would at least like to clarify a certain point, especially for the sake of people around here who're as young as I am. We tend to find, in the word philosophy, a certain deterrent - the notion that philosophy is what is contained in the texts of two thousand or three thousand years ago. That isn't necessarily how it's got to be. Now, that is a treatise, or a dissertation or a discourse on philosophy. We'll grow up to understand that much later. For the moment, I think we can find wisdom, we can find perspective, in a whole lot of things closer to our time. It's important to read. I can't underscore that enough. It's important to read simply to gain that perspective.

It may be a different thing when you're reading stuff from a few centuries or a few millennia ago. You don't identify directly with the setting. So, as a result, you don't get lost in the story that the periphery tells you. The moment you look at the story it strikes you that there is a core that has to be dug at. And you proceed to dig at it. You proceed to interpret it as an allegorical work. And I believe that any exercise in interpretation invariably yields some amount of wisdom or the other - some amount of truth.

Just as an example - a rather far fetched one, perhaps. All of us have read Tintin comics, haven't we? Show of hands? How many have? (hands go up) Nice! They're about seventy years old on this planet. They're just comics to us. How unlikely do you think it is that, say, a thousand years from now, given that these comics might still be preserved until then, since people can no longer identify with anything peripheral - they can't identify with the clothes or the guns or the cars or the rockets, or even the concept of a dog talking in French or English or whatever, it is then that they start to look at the core? And it is then that they start to see all the stuff about the interaction of human character, the interaction of social forces. And in this process of interpretation of Tintin comics as an allegorical work of the twentieth century, they start to find this very subtle - not non-existent; it does exist - there is a very subtle commentary, on the world at the time of the two world wars. How unlikely is it that this will be seen only two thousand years later when we're so quick to ignore it right now?

The point I'm making is not that we should all read Tintin a little extra carefully. What I'm saying is that we need to give all literature its due. Given that we're still too young to understand all that the works of, say, two or three thousand years ago have to say directly about philosophy by way of a discourse, we can at least look to find our ideas about life as close as seventy years ago, and even closer.

All right, so I've spoken about philosophy. Whatever it is, you've got to find your own brand of philosophy - you've got to make an informed decision. The advantage with today's world is that it exposes you to so much thought. Whatever it is that you might find, it will be either your own unique brand, or a composite of a whole lot of existing schools of thought. In either case, it would have been the result of careful thought, consideration, contemplation, reflection.

What I'm trying to say is that this philosophy is important because it goes into making your list of priorities in life. It is your philosophy which eventually is going to make either an ascetic or a workaholic or a family man or a social worker or a national leader out of you. In the rest of the talk, I believe I shall like to talk about these other roles - what our philosophy, our own personal philosophy deems important to us.

I was talking about those other roles. Most of us will agree that we all have some sense of belonging to a larger unit, whatever that larger unit might be. I know people who can't think beyond their own family. There're some other people who can't think beyond community as defined by caste or religion. For some others it is a political unit like a state, or maybe the linguistic group that it stands for. Then there're people who think of the larger unit as their country. And then that step further - humanity.

I mentioned those separate cases - ascetic, workaholic, family, society, and the nation. I can't speak for all of them but I can speak for one which I believe is my case, and I hope, given that we're these IITians, constantly reminded of the amount of taxpayers' money going into funding our education, I believe our priorities might be quite the same too. And I say what I identify as the larger unit is our country. Maybe some day, when we're more capable, we'll go ahead and do humanity a big favour as well. But for the moment, we'd like to keep our country in mind. Or maybe, given all the expectations the world has of us, we ought to.

This is where I'd like to sound what I'd like to call a complacency alert. A little later I shall also call it a timidity alert. I don't want to talk about brain drain. I don't want to descend into a discussion on that. But I believe the reason so many of us so willingly leave our country is not that we're indifferent to what it needs, but simply that we're not aware that we're required.

So many of us comfortably believe India is fine - "India is shining. I can go ahead leave the place, do all the research I want, make money, perhaps. Whatever. Get a good job. Leave the place." But I think if we stopped to really look around, think about it, we'd all find enough reasons to either stay back here, or at least very firmly resolve to come back. And I'm talking about reasons distinctly less selfish than, "All said and done, all the good jobs are here, man. All the money is here, man." (spoken with an IITM accent - man pronounced maan!)

That's not what I'm talking about. There's another reason altogether. India's shining, right? We give this small urban part of our country a facelift. We proceed to gloat over all the economic freedom we've got. We gloat over how high the GDP is. We gloat over how many shopping malls there are. We gloat over how beautiful the city looks in the night from the sky. We gloat over all the Italian restaurants there are in a square mile. We gloat over the quality of night life, now comparable with the best in the West. And then we go on to say, "You don't need to be in the US any more to make money. You can do that in India. And what's more - you can now enjoy that money in India."

We think India is doing fine. This is the kind of lame urban prattle I hear all around me. We hear it all around us. It's nothing but complacency. I wouldn't call it indifference. Maybe what we really need to do is stop and think about how a large part of that progress - that facade of progress has been achieved.

What, if I may stop to ask the people in this audience, in your opinion, is India's largest selling point, at least as a player in the world market? If anybody would volunteer a guess. You maybe more correct than I am, but at least I've got one in mind. Anyone?

(someone says "tech professionals")
Yeah but I don't intend to touch upon that.
(someone else says "cheap")
Cheap! Precisely!
(he adds, "cheap labour")
Exactly! Cheap labour.

We're a country, not unlike many other countries, who go forward by exploiting the very lowest strata of our society. All our progress we talk about is built fundamentally upon exploitation of these poor. We progress, all right, but we don't understand that in order to progress, you've got to keep that person over there in precisely the same position that forty years later he's going to treasure the thirty rupees a day that you give him. And the moment he commands any more, we lose the edge in the world market. We're no longer a cheap selling country. And the moment we're no longer a cheap selling country, nobody comes to us.

How many of us want this kind of progress? If this is how we win our progress - if this is how we achieve our progress - what part of it do any of us want? For several centuries now, several sections of our community have been oppressed for our convenience. For several centuries, women have been oppressed for our convenience. We at least see the latter changing in the urban areas, if not anywhere else. But there is a very innate sense of resistance, I believe, among a large section of the people who are well off - there is a resistance to change in the former. Those oppressed classes. You want to keep them where they are. You need that person to shine your shoe for one rupee. You don't want him to ask you for ten bucks later in life. We don't want to give them that awareness. We want to keep them there - we want to retain that convenience.

There're so many people who'll take offence when I talk about the poor and the weak being the larger part of our country. That's standard rhetoric, isn't it? Everyone says that. "We're the youth. We've got to pride ourselves for what we've got to give. How dare you suggest that we're a country of the poor? We're world citizens. We speak English, C++ and Java. We're a liberated country. Our women ride bicycles. And one of them went on to become an astronaut. How dare you suggest that that is India when here we are in all our glory?"

That is India for a cause probably many of us don't understand. Those people give us a lot more than we care to acknowledge, possibly even deserve. They're our kisans. We exploit them. I don't even have to talk about how they're exploited. Go read Premchand. You'll know. They're our javans. And they're exploited.

Think about it. We're the educated people. We can hide behind our educated opinions - "I don't believe in war. Shanti shanti." But war is as old as the world and it will continue to happen as long as there is the smallest disagreement over anything. War can be whimsical. War can be ideological. The fact is the guy who goes down there and risks having a bullet put through his head, is your javan. And you and I don't become javans. You and I become officers - we clink glasses and say "Cheers!" Of course we make strategies and all sorts of things but the fact is we don't lay our lives down. "Why is that important?" Of course, like I said, we have our educated opinions.

The government that we don't elect decides that we're going to war. We don't care, of course. We're not like the US. We don't send every able-bodied man to go and fight in Vietnam. We send our javans. We send our poor and weak.

I remember watching this National Geographic documentary quite a long time back about human sacrifice. And it said in the end - all said and done, how different is war from human sacrifice? Isn't it the sacrifice of the weak? You don't give your own life up. If Vajpayee and Musharraf have a disagreement - I understand it's not practical for our Prime Minister to go and fight - but the point is you never sacrifice yourself. You sacrifice your weak.

And for as much as we owe this larger and weaker part of our country, we're content to keep them where they are. A large section of us, of course, is complacent enough to believe we give them food; we give them clothing when there's an earthquake, and so, we're being humans. Excellent. That's all we need to do. How many of us are willing to sacrifice that convenience, which will be lost if they become aware of their rights as humans, and go ahead to make them aware and educate them? How many of us are willing to do that now? It may be a difficult decision to make now, put just pull it off like a band-aid. And I think it's better for the country at large.

What is the importance of our staying back in our country? When does our technical knowledge find any meaning? Now, nobody is anyone to tell me, "You sat here for four years. The country paid for your education in engineering. So if you've got to serve your country, you will serve it as an engineer, goddammit." Nobody will tell me that. The ultimate aim, I believe, has got to be to uplift our poor and weak. That can be done in one of two ways. Either you directly apply your technical knowledge to their empowerment, where possible, or on the other hand, you do, by the side, some humanitarian work to bring these people into a league which can benefit from it. I think that is our duty. I could be wrong. Maybe too much of our time would go into humanitarian work if that's all we cared to think about. But fact is it would be worth it. We can't call ourselves a progressing nation until that progress is everyone's to take.

What would we be doing if we left this country? We'd be leaving these people, who actually need us, to turn to our government. Now, these chaps are precisely the ones who stand to benefit from their ignorance and their misery. They're not going to empower them. I think if we stayed back, and at some point in our lives when we are capable of making a difference to them, we, between the few million of us, or the few hundred million of us, could do much more good to the remaining billion, than one government that doesn't care, which we didn't elect in the first place.

We can leave that government to pit the mythological age culture against the Age of Mythology culture in its imagined battles of great importance. And even those cultural issues, I believe, are questions that we have much better answers to than those people in any case. I've thought often about what it is that plagues us as a people so confused about our cultural identity. I don't want to beat down upon the English language. I think it's a wonderful - unfortunate but wonderful - gift. It just happened. Let's not talk about why, and all the suffering that went into getting rid of those people. In any case, that is something we've stood to benefit from - a great deal.

But I feel, somewhere down the line, at least in the cities, English has become more than just a language It's become a way of life. And I find myself questioning the need for that.

Now, just by the side, I happen to know a lot of people - elderly people - possibly in their fifties or sixties now, who I always used to admire as a kid. They spoke beautiful English. They were so very knowledgeable, well read. Spoke beautifully. And then suddenly, my father would tell me, "Do you know that he studied till class 5 in Telugu medium" or Tamil medium or whatever. And I'd be like, "Oh my God! Is that even possible?"

Those people were educated in what today we will condescend to call a local medium. And in fact, you would never find them betraying themselves until you happened to be around them in a moment in which they were doing some small arithmetic calculation and they went "Okati rendu moodu naalugu aidu aaru" or whatever. Until then, you wouldn't know.

These people learnt English as a language and no more. And they've gone on to have all the benefits from it that we require as a nation - that we require as people - access to world literature, world thought - literature on everything, I mean. Now, I'm not suggesting that we return to that system. India being as cosmopolitan and diffused and mixed as it is, it isn't possible in a city like Madras or Hyderabad, for instance, to educate every primary school kid in the local language. That's not possible. That's not what I'm saying should be done either.

But try and understand what purpose that served. It grounded them in their own culture. They didn't learn those nursery rhymes until they were in 6th class. That makes a big difference when you're growing up, I believe - when you're not thinking about Jack and Jill but thinking about Murugan and Thimmappa, for instance. Whatever. It's that device. It might have been a primary school education - being educated till you were ten years of age - being grounded in your own culture by way of an education in your own language till the age of ten. After that, you learn English. You learn it as a foreign language, you in fact learn it better. I know people who know French and German over here who'd probably give all French and Germans a run for their money. Precisely for the reason that they're learning it as a foreign language and learn it much better.

Now, I have no suggestions to make to solve this problem, but I think it's important that we realise it is a problem we need to solve. To try and solve, eventually - if not now, over a period of two hundred or three hundred or four hundred years. It's something we need to address. What is it that is going to be our new age solution to the problem of grounding our young in their culture, say until the age of ten? I have a humble twenty-one-year-old suggestion to make - the same twenty-one-year-old who eats toffees off his father's flights. Maybe we need to revisit the concept of education at home. It may not be practical, given as busy as our parents are and how far away most of our grandparents live. It may not be practical, but think about it - we need something to substitute for that device that grounds us in our culture when we're upto ten years old.

Our cultural identity is hard to define. I mean, we've had such a long and diverse past. Some people think it's got to be defined by Rama, Krishna and their bows and arrows. That isn't necessary. I remember reading the other day about - rather, not reading - someone else read and told me - about these little Japanese video game characters, dolls, whatnot - the works. They're called Pokemons and they're getting incredibly popular among the kids of today. Now, I don't remember if it was the Shiv Sena or whoever - they got extremely insecure - "How can these things be allowed to flourish? They're going to be overthrowing our characters like Lord Rama and Lord Krishna. We've got to ban them." And that is when I thought in utter disgust - is that the kind of nation that we are? What kind of a victory would it be for Lord Rama, seventh, is it (?), incarnation of Lord Vishnu, if his victory came from nipping all competition in the bud - if his victory came from quelling and suppressing the popularity of some little Japanese monsters? We need to solve our problems in a way that befits our time, and befits our greatness even, as a nation. I'll end this talk and proceed to what I shall call Appendix A in a while, with this little story.

There was this person, roundabout twenty or thirty years ago, I believe (Note: I later found out the year was 1967). He conducted a quiz in a school in Delhi. All these questions about Greek and Roman and Nordic mythology were being cracked all over the place. And then one question was asked - "What is the name of Lord Rama's mother?" And that was passed. That person I believe was Anant Pai (Note: I had reason to believe Anant Pai had been awarded either the Padma Vibhushan or Padma Bhushan or Padma Shri, though I wasn't absolutely certain. Some unforgivable slip made me say Bharat Ratna in the actual speech!). Uncle Pai. He founded Amar Chitra Katha. And today, Amar Chitra Katha tells you everything you need to know about everything Indian - right from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, through the Jataka and the Panchatantra, through Rana Pratap and Akbar and Birbal, through our little state folklore, through the Indian Independence struggle, through even scientists like Yellapragada Subbarao, and I'm pretty sure there's going to be one about Abdul Kalam. Those are the kind of answers I believe we're capable of finding for any problems that exist in our country. And that is the kind of person I hope you and I grow up to be.

I'll move to Appendix A now.

I've kind of evaded this topic that in many people's minds goes hand in hand with the word philosophy, and that is spirituality. Now I'm too young to understand what that means exactly. I can claim to have toyed with the idea a bit - I have my own brand of meditation that some of my friends know about and probably laugh about behind my back. It may not be very effective but it means the world to me. That exercise means the world to me. As far as I see it, and I'm quite sure my opinion's going to be revised over the next twenty or thirty years, spirituality is about an awareness of your existence. Spiritual joy is about being happy to be alive - about becoming one with the beauty you perceive in any aspect of life.

Now, this moment, that has been captured in this photograph, is what I count as probably my most special, nearly spiritual moment. It's just incidental that I happened to photograph it, and the happiness that I claim to have does not owe itself to the fact that I'm able to share it with the whole world and get an ooh and aah out of you. Being able to live in this moment - being able to photograph, of course added a little bit of the pleasure, because for around two or three minutes, I interacted with the system very closely, interacted very closely with the life, without disturbing it; I had a 4x zoom on my camera and I couldn't get any closer. And when I was in this moment, I was aware of nothing else. I suppose that is what spirituality is supposed to be about. But, any meditation and any directed deliberate effort at spiritual bliss apart, this is what I count as among my most special moments. I'll leave you to have a look at it (Lights go off, image on projector). To be able to live this moment was among the greatest gifts I've ever been given. This is a photo I call Vanity - My Favourite Sin (This photograph is available on my gallery at http://www.rpmduplex.net/rahul/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=for_arts_sake&id=Vanity_My_Favourite_Sin).

With this, I'd like to end. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I'll take any questions now.(Applause)

(After the very long Question and Answer session that I obviously chose not to transcribe, I returned for a closing comment called Appendix B. Note that I spoke quite informally in the Q&A and the IITM lingo hangover shows here in Appendix B!)

Just one little thing I forgot to mention back there. I'm kinda keen on putting that funda. When I was talking about trying to mimic the order of evolution of humanity at large in our own lives, there is one thing I wanted to say - a certain observation I've made that life is somewhat fractal - by which I mean it is self-similar, irrespective of scale. And at all scales, some sort of patterns emerge. Just as a parting question, how many of us fourth years have noticed, this miraculous one-to-one correspondence between the four phases of life as laid down by ancient Indian thinkers, and our own four years in IIT? First year - brahmachari; second year - whatever, you start to make your life; third year - you're on top; fourth year - literally, you stop to prepare for your afterlife! That is one thing I wanted to talk about.

Ok. I think I'm required to get off stage now. Thank you so much. (Applause)

(At this point, Prof. Devdas Menon was invited onto stage to give me a memento, before which he spoke the words that have touched me more than any other in recent times. I choose not to transcribe those words here. Let it pass as humility. Just maybe in that moment, I grew old enough to be honoured, and not just kicked, in a nice humble kind of way.)