Farewell Speech

This is the text of my farewell speech yesterday:

18th July, 2006. I took the letter in my hand and looked at its contents. Tears slowly trickled down my eyes as I walked towards my room. Terrible thoughts gushed through my mind. What had I done to deserve this? Why was this happening to me? What now? It was as if the world had come crumbling down around me..

10th February, 2008. I’d often heard of tears of a different kind, but never experienced it. But here I was, unable to hold them back, unable to stop them. It had to be the best moment of my life- a feeling which I had never experienced before. And then, the DJ played “Yaaron Dosti..”

Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Respected director sir, dean sir and other professors, and my dear friends. I am standing here to talk about what defines our batch.

In the first incident, when I had broken down in my room, the entire batch had gathered in the basketball court to show solidarity. While I was shattered, they had decided to take collective responsibility for our actions, who were caught in the ragging case. Having never seen something like this before, I was truly touched at the unity and benevolence shown back then.

On 10th February, 2008; when the song was played, everyone had come together in a circle to celebrate. After all, this is what Felicity stand for- building trusts and relationships and celebrating it with the same spirit. It was not just about proving comments like, “Yours is a useless batch- You can’t do this” etc wrong, rather far from it. It was about the consonance and harmony which we were able to achieve. A mail from one of my seniors summed it up beautifully. It read, “I have never witnessed this kind of energy or spirit permeating the entire campus.” From Felicity, what else could we have asked for?

When I look back at these moments today, I see that in the depths of despair and the heights of happiness, we’ve all been together. I know that my batch was always with me; and so it must be the case with many of us.

When we muffed up during the batch trip, people did not throw stones, but accepted whatever we had with a smile and tried to work around it. When somebody wanted to stand for a post, people only encouraged him.

If there is one thing which we’d take back from Jeevan Vidya, it’ll be the point about trusting others intentions and not judging them by their actions. Good relationships, both within the students and with the faculty has been the bedrock of whatever we’ve done. If we were told that Felicity was always full of skirmishes with everyone, we tried to build bridges. So what if we don’t blog about the issues we have, we always go and sort them out.

We have faced so many issues as a batch- changes being brought about, admin issues like hostels, a recession during placements, but we’ve been together in all this.

As Aniket rightly pointed out in his blog, we were never brilliant or exceptional, but we’ve built from scratch. Be it not having touched a computer to reaching the ACM finals and becoming the system administrator; or never having seen a basketball to breaking into the college team. Improvement and excellence in our fields through collective learning is what we’ve looked for.

The great Baha’u’llah had once said that, “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the entire world”. I dare speak in behalf of my batch that this should be our legacy. I sincerely hope and pray that our juniors ensure that.

I take this opportunity to thank our juniors for having walked shoulder to shoulder as equals in all our endeavors. I’d thank the faculty for having placed their trust in us.

Two weeks from now, we’re going to be missing all this. As I stand here for the final time in my college life, I just have two clichéd words for my batch. Thank you.