Bagchi - Constant Change

Dean Cammy Abernathy, esteemed members of faculty and staff, family and friends congregated to witness todays graduation ceremony and, most importantly, my dear graduating students.

I cannot tell you how honoured I feel to be in your midst today. I feel deeply grateful that you have bestowed the honour on me and, through me, on Mindtree, the enterprise I co-founded fifteen years ago. As we built what is now an IT services company with 13,000 people, we chose to set up our US Development Center here at Gainesville. This centre is a three-way collaboration between your university, the state of Florida, and Mindtree. We chose to come here largely because of the reputation of the University of Florida.

Given our relationship, when Dean Abernathy asked me to be your commencement speaker, I was delighted. But then I asked her: do students really listen to commencement speeches, particularly from people two or three times their age? Dean Abernathy replied emphatically, Yes, young people listen, they pay attention. In particular, they want to be inspired. Then she said something I will never forget. She said, Our job is to inspire young people. You cannot inspire them enough.

Drowned in the ordinariness of our existence, sometimes dealing with our own struggles and frustrations, and during the occasional, inevitable moments of cynicism, we adults often forget the responsibility to inspire. But we can never inspire enough. We cannot just say that we did our bit and that no more needs to be done.

To my graduating student friends, I give you the words of your dean: your job and mine will always be to inspire. And we can never inspire enough!

You have already begun.

I asked you to write to me with your questions and with your thoughts on what you wanted to hear from me at Commencement today. As your responses poured in, I marvelled at the quality of your intellect and the power of your humanity. You sent in questions that astonished me with their thoughtfulness, kindness and wisdom. You revealed your ambitions, your fears, your strength and your fragility. You took my breath away.

One question in particular moved me deeply, touching on matters of change and identity, on how to keep ones sense of self in an ever-changing environment. Your classmate Elise Burke wrote, and I paraphrase only slightly:

As a student about to enter a new world, I have this feeling of loss. Im sure it is something that we all must be feeling: that, by graduating, we are potentially losing a part of ourselves. How does one deal with that, morph that into a new world, and ease the weird, empty feeling that comes with graduating and entering the unknown? How do we keep ourselves?

You are not alone. Everyone seated here has felt this way at some point. These have been my feelings when I left college, and then when I left my professional life to start a company at twenty-eight; I felt that way again when that company folded up and I began working as a manager in a large corporation, and then when I left that contented but cocooned life to co-found Mindtree fifteen years ago. Even now as I stand here in front of you, that weird, empty feeling is coming back to me as I contemplate the inevitable transition that will happen for me in a few years from now.

That you are potentially losing a part of yourself will be a recurring theme for the rest of your life and you will find yourself asking, How do I morph into a new world, ease the weird, empty feeling that comes from entering the unknown, and keep my sense of self?

One day, a few years from now, perhaps you will find yourself sitting in your tiny home-office, pensive because you had to sell your start-up company, which was your baby, because if you hadnt, it would have shut down. And you will be asking yourself these very same questions.

You will ask them when you are sitting in your office in the White House, alone except for the sound of a janitors vacuum cleaner out in the hallway. You will have just completed your second term in office and tomorrow, after eight years, you will no longer be the President of the country.

The questions will come to you when you leave your comfortable, glamorous job as the CEO of a Fortune 100 firm, because you have decided to take on the responsibility of turning around a struggling international relief organization.

And you know what? The questions will rise again as you move in and out of some very precious relationships in your personal life.

So, Elise, you have put your finger on a vein that pulses below the cheers and celebrations of the day: the idea of change. How will you handle it? How will you make the trade-offs? How will you deal with the loss? How will you survive this?