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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

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

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...

The Circus called Politics

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...

The Harpist by the River

Preface One of the songs that has haunted me all along is By the Rivers of Babylon by Boney M [1978]. It is inspired by the biblical Psalm 137. The Psalm was written after the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered the kingdom of Judah and destroyed their most sacred temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were soon exiled to Babylon. Then some Babylonians asked the Jews to sing songs for them. Psalm 137 is a response to that: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” There is profound sorrow in the psalm. Exile and longing for homeland, oppression by enemies, and loss of identity are dominant themes. Boney M succeeded in carrying all those deep emotions and pain in their verses too. As I was wondering what to write for today’s #WriteAPageADay challenge, Boney M’s version of Psalm 137 wafted into my consciousness from the darkness and silence outside my bedroom long before daybreak. How to make it make sense to a reader of today who may know nothing about the Jewish exile ...