Tis Grad Time

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?

Stir the World?

Someone wise once told me that God has a purpose for each of us for which he has already prepared us. I know that more often than not, I have gone astray from my purpose and from the path that I set out on. At times, I feel I am living in a matrix and there would never be a way out. Or that, I simply do not want to venture out; after all this is comforting enough. Yet, there are times where my ideological inclinations are strong enough and that itself lead me to the feeling of actually being outside the matrix. So as I switch in and out of this so-called virtual reality, I do so assuming that I am not alone. Often, this issue of purpose, journey et al figure in my conversations with friends who think that the odyssey of our lives take their own course but there is always a particular 'something' that guides us, directs us and leads us on. Frank Buchman used the North Star as an interesting metaphor in describing IofC's (formerly, Moral Re-Armament) overarching objectives of being the change in the world in that, "We may never reach the North Star but it always guides our path".

In this day and age, it is easy to be carried away with what goes on in our daily routine and take comfort in what we seek around us. However, once in a while we come across instances - what we see, experience, something we reflect on, a complete 'deja vu', or just an act of being - that remind us of our paths, of where we belong, and of where we are set out to be. A video I came across recently has stirred my path, to remind me where I ought to be. I share this with you hoping that you too would be reminded of yours -

Much ado about gifts

They say that it is not the gift that matters but indeed the thought that counts! Clearly, this would be an easy way out in my never-ending plight to hunt for a (decent if not perfect) gift for A. But then a serious problem arises when there is a greater mismatch between the thoughts and the gifts per se. I mean, if this were true then I could really just express what I ‘thought’ of gifting him – saving myself the trouble of the larger issue. Or simpler still, thanks to the virtual realities we live in, use the Facebook gifts option (oh gosh, that would be terrible indeed!). So I wonder if it is merely the ‘thought’ of the gift or the entire package – the thought, the intention, the actual gift.

Now do not get me wrong here. I love to gift; love the ‘thought’ of gifting and the entire process involved right from ‘shopping’ around town (or better still, creating something from sctrach), making sure it is the right match, to the funky wrapping, ensuring there is enough gag-ness to it and the works. HOWEVER, the problem lies when deciding what to get especially with the D-Day fast approaching. So as I near the deadline, the struggle currently lies in whether to gift something:

1. that is top-of-the-line product one is sure to like (boring?)
2. I 'know' he wants (quite predictable)
3. I 'think' he needs (dangerous)
4. I 'know' he needs (boring again)
5. I like and hence he may like it too (assumptions are not healthy)
Or 6. I like and hence get it so I could use it too (perfect)

While this dilemma is endless, the question really is whether the thought matters more than the gift. I would say the thought is as important as the gift. In a way, we humans live in a cycle of give-and-take and are genetically programmed to be touched by receiving gifts - irrespective of occasions - to love, cherish and enjoy.

I mean, seriously, the element of pleasure and surprises we revel in when someone showers us with gift, no matter what the occasion, is priceless as opposed to when someone told you I 'thought' of getting 'x' for you but could not do so which may be sweet but not as exciting. Also, age must have something to do with the way we perceive gifting. As a kid, the concept of gifts (both, receiving and giving) was much much much more thrilling and sort of intellectually stimulating as opposed to the brain-dead that exists as we move out of childhood (that would be my present status). Yet, somewhere deep down there do exist those 'memories' of gifts in the past where the thought indeed mattered and it is those moments that naturally trigger our innate being. So the intermix of thought, love and 'action' is what goes into a gift and that matters most to me when gift-hunting. But my search to gift A still continues...