Skip to main content

New Beginning



The following is an edited version of a speech I delivered this morning to an assembly of about 2000 students.

We are at the threshold of a new academic session. A new beginning. Life is full of new beginnings and old endings. Every day is a new beginning which ends with an old sunset. Today, however, is a special day. This day marks the beginning of a new session that will last a whole year.

Every new beginning comes with a whole lot of promises. Every new beginning comes with an offer of magic, of magical transformations. You are all potential magicians. You love magic and you would love to be magicians too. The fact is that each one of you is a potential magician.

Magic is a way of looking at life, a different way of looking at things. Perspective, that’s what it is. Perspective is a way of seeing reality. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the famous saying about the two men who looked out from the same window. Two men looked out from the same window. One saw mud and the other saw stars. One looked at the soil below; the other looked at the sky above. Both looked out from the same window but saw different things. That’s the difference made by perspective. Perspective is the magic of life. Perspective makes the entire difference to your life.


Many of you are Harry Potter fans. Let me paraphrase Harry’s teacher Dumbledore. “It’s not your ability that matters, Harry, as much as your perspective.” It’s not your ability that matters as much as your perspective. It doesn’t mean your ability is not important. It means how you use your abilities creates the magic.

You possess the magic within you. Go ahead and unfold that magic. Be the wizard. Be the winner. Every marvel from the Taj Mahal to the Karakoram Highway, all those skyscrapers and flyovers are all creations of individuals like you and me. But with one difference. Those individuals chose to discover the magic within them. Discover the magic within you. Create all the marvels you can dream of.  I wish you a year full of magic ahead.

Comments

  1. A new beginning with a new perspective - reflective, magical, down to earth targeting the stars- the students have a wonderful teacher to lead them up the stairs of life! My hats off to you Sir

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perhaps I needed your this speech most this evening. Though my student life is very much behind me but I guess as a student of school of life I needed the dosage of your words seriously today. Perspective is the thing!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...