To Commencement Speeches

Dear Vignesh (Jackie),

Thank you for sharing your bible, Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech, with me yesterday.

Actually, I do recollect watching it by the start of college.

I’d sat admiring his words & wisdom — so great to know this early, God I’m so doing this — though in the practice of my youth, I’d lacked a way to keep his wisdom held.

The words had to be written down, marked onto one’s map.

Yesterday, upon rewatching it, I made it a point to mark it down:

Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did.

The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on.

I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.

I made my list right after school, and collected in it till graduation. But things had to be adjourned. In the months after college, I’d given in & bought the idea of a career.

And a week ago, I sought a technical job to let me retake CAT, and an extra GMAT, paying another stem year from my 20’s to meet an opulent IIM-ABC or ISB, when infact IIM-Indore, a humble choice at hand, was generous for my need— which is just plain financial stability in a non-deadening job so I am free to pursue the list. ABC was never in there. How had it made sense to retake CAT and dismiss Indore?

And so, I’m certain now to accept IIM-I if I get in.

This is the second commencement speech that’s brought to fore an insidious contamination of thought, the first, David Foster Wallace’s:

Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way.
…
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.” It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

With Wallace in mind, I’m at peace when an adamant person steals my seat in bus, or when speeding bikers bring me to step all the way back on a crossing, or I’m held waiting in a dead queue or I’m brought to bear the disgruntle of another’s bad day. With Wallace in mind, I feel less personally persecuted by the universe.

His commencement speech, is markedly in my map.
Vignesh, you should hear him.