This and the past couple of weeks have been all about graduation and commencement speeches. Facebook has photos of friends graduating while emails galore with the transcript of several speeches by the oh-so-popular celebrities – Jobs, Page, Bush, Oprah, Schmidt, Clinton, the First Lady and POTUS himself. It’s a moment of pride and exhilaration, a day to laugh and to revel in all the adulation the graduands receive from their families, professors, friends to the speaker of the day.It has been quite some time since I graduated and while I can barely recall the commencement address given at my graduation, I quite enjoy reading what varied orators have to say on that day year after year. Sometimes it is the typical cheesy stuff about growth and change while some with a few funny anecdotes thrown around but most with utmost sincerity, good food for thought and a path stirrer. Baz Luherman did a good job with his sunscreen sequence, in my opinion, of providing snippets from retrospection and thanks to the musical note, is something one can easily remember. There are some inspirational statements which I can almost never remember but one gets the gist, or so I assume.
However, do these speeches do any good, I still wonder. For one, they provide the media with a tool to hammer the speakers about what they ‘said’, why they said what they said and what they support/do not support. They are also considered as fillers to the overall handing-out ceremony. My parents really enjoyed the speech given during my brother’s graduation ceremony years ago so that did some good there. Other than that, they become items to forward around, motivating quotes to quote, some for future reference et al. But otherwise, wonder if they are merely transcripts archived in the books of yesteryears.
Seriously though, there are way too many distractions in the Hall/Lawn to be focused on the prose being delivered – be it the outfit, the weather, those shoes, the lighting or the heartthrob. My colleague mentioned that a good commencement speech is one which makes a statement with “…if you could remember one thing from my speech that would be…..”
So a day considered to be a momentous occasion, with newest possible ideas out in the open still remains fragmented with tit-bits of time. Is that what it takes to be a Graduate?
