Commencement address: Jagdish Sagar '60

Let me start by congratulating the class of 2008; and I'd also like to congratulate their parents on such an impressive-looking group of young people. It is always a pleasure to come back to Woodstock, and it's a privilege to have been invited on this occasion.

When your Principal invited me to deliver the Commencement Address this year, I was too taken aback to refuse. I have been reflecting ever since on what I might possibly say. Now the obvious way to start is to remember my own experience of Commencement, in this very place, at this time of year in 1960. It was, I should think, pretty much the same in general, though different in points of detail-the boys wore white dinner jackets with black bow ties, the girls wore white dresses. The class was smaller-about forty of us-because the student body was more evenly divided among age groups in those days. We sang a class song "When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high." That's a custom that seems to have disappeared, but now you have a class name-if I'd known, your name might have given me a few talking points. ("Renaissance" - Ed.)

There are many other things, things people said, turns in people's relationships, things that happened, conversations, that I remember vividly. There was, also, a Commencement Address. I remember listening to it; it was a good speech. But I honestly cannot-and not for want of trying-remember who the speaker was or a word of what he said. I don't, in fairness, expect you to remember anything I say.

Marking the completion of our years in school is one of the very few more forward-looking, hopeful (in the old-fashioned sense of being filled with hope) transitions that most of us live through. There are others-getting married is obviously a very hopeful thing to do. There might be other, more wildly hopeful brief moments in our lives-I hope there are. But finishing school is a special kind of shared experience. Conventionally we make it mark the end of a stage of preparing for life, after which we go out into the world, a whole class going our separate ways. We'll know in retrospect how it actually mattered, but for now it's a marker.

Occasions, when they're important-like this one-mark themselves; they don't really need the help of an outside speaker. And anyway it's remarkable-or is it?-how few we remember of all the speeches we listen to. I went on the net and had no difficulty finding a collection of Commencement Addresses, by the Great and the Good of the last few generations-mostly in America, of course. These were all people who were celebrities.They all seemed to feel that they had lessons to share with the younger people they were addressing-don't we all?-and they were probably right in supposing that that is what was expected of them. And many of them were important enough, or interesting enough, to know they could hold their audience's attention with snippets of autobiography.

William Allen White, the great journalist and editor, addressing the class of 1937 at Northwestern University, started out more humbly: "There you sit across an abysm scarcely fifty feet wide but deeper than the distance to the moon. I come out of one dream world that is memory. You go into a visionary world that is hope. .. We dwell on these two different planets. How can I hope to get across the chasm of time and space any hint, even a flickering shadow of my truth that will reach your hearts?... Today you look back upon a world that has moved so far in one hundred years that nothing you see and feel, touch and taste, hope, believe, and love is as it was when your grandfathers learned from their grandfathers how to live in another day."

One could say that again, today. But think again. One could, I suggest, have said much the same thing a hundred years earlier to a hypothetical class of 1837-or even to a class of 1537. Lord Macaulay, a famous man in his time, still very well-known in India, and one of the great windbags of all time, wrote in the 1830s: "If any person had told the Parliament .after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams.that London would be twice as large, and that. the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half.that stage coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels."

We always seem to think the world is changing beyond recognition, or is about to. But that's actually something we have in common with our forebears: throughout most of history they thought so too, and said so. I believe it could be demonstrated that anybody, anytime, who lived to a ripe old age lived in a world that was very different, in some way that mattered to him or her, than what he or she had grown up in. I believe any older person throughout most of history would tell you that the world had changed vastly since their time.

And that isn't necessarily about technology. We speak and think differently from 1960. We say "he and she" or sometimes just "she" where it used to be "he". In India, who you break bread with isn't so much of an issue anymore. America might get an Afro-American President. But how deep do these changes really go? How far are they merely cosmetic? Do distinctions and inequalities merely take subtler forms? Or is one inequality exchanged for another? People live longer, and on the average certainly have more, but don't they still want whatever they want, just as badly? We've no real way of knowing whether people are really happier-whatever that means-or unhappier than they were.

What gets to me with the past is the glimpses we get of ourselves in a different situation, flashes of the same human nature across that "chasm of time" that one of the speakers I quoted thought he saw. There actually isn't anything in any record of the past that doesn't give us those glimpses. In the National Museum in Delhi is a small collection of clay toys from Mohenjodaro; these are possibly the oldest toys in existence. I'm sure it's possible to describe them very usefully in academic, archaeological or anthropological terminology. But they're attractive, ingenious little toys and they have to have been made by someone for some particular child: it's more natural to simply imagine the state of mind of the person making them for that kid five thousand years ago; and to imagine the child as it got the toy.

The story of David and Goliath, as told in the King James Version of the Bible that my generation was brought up on starts with David being sent to deliver some provisions to his brothers in the army. But his father Jesse adds, "And carry these ten cheeses unto the captain of their thousand." It was those ten cheeses for the captain that stuck in my mind the last time I read the whole passage, which could have been four decades ago. A completely gratuitous bit of information, as far as the story is concerned, wholly irrelevant to the narrative, and by our standards not necessarily a very honourable way to behave (for either Jesse or the captain). But, perhaps for those reasons, it came across to me as an unexpected flash of real life, and real human nature, across that chasm.

The past is another country-another culture, another economy, another society, another polity, a different dialect even where it's the same language. But it is inhabited by the same kind of people, in the same human condition. Those people are usually getting it wrong and having to start over: that's what the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis are all about. This is a Christian school, but whatever our personal answers to the bigger questions-including the one of living without an answer to them-you can be sure they were thought of a long time ago. What we read in Proverbs is as true across generations as it is across geographies: "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man."

I know the future will always take us by surprise-nobody ever predicted the most important changes in the world, in any era. I like to think you'll come back here at about my age, from a very different world and find some comfort in all the things that haven't changed. I hope you'll change the world, and yet know what hasn't changed-and can't. Good luck!