Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A Message of Congrats...


While I ruminate in preparation for the next post which will probably be a series of posts scattered throughout the timeline of the blog (as you are allowed to schedule updates), I wanted to share something my parents presented me with on my Graduation day... this is a series of excerpts from the letter that I think speaks to all of us...

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Title: The World has become your Playground...

In a mad world of restless minds and empty hearts, success has become a mere concept that is measured by the number of letters following your name or a list of degrees frozen in lifeless certificates... ambition to scale unprecedented heights of performance has replaced the yearning to seek knowledge that uplifts and enlightens... competition to get ahead of others at any expense has resulted in wounded egos and bleeding hearts, reducing our coveted birth as humans to a curse of survival of the fittest.

Success is not just achieving and accumulating, or climbing and crossing. It is rather that state of performance that fulfills while elevating, that imparts happiness while infusing a sense of well being to the one who succeeds as well as to all around him. It is the lack of sympathetic happiness, or being happy for other people's sucess, that is responsible for most of the negativity encounted in professional life...

Though the length of the course was only a year, the content crystallized into it was so vast and boundless that it defies definition as it challenges delineation. INSEAD has made of you a new person...it has scorched you with its uncompromising schedules and breathless deadlines, it washed away the last vestiges of immaturity in your personality, it has passed you through its crushing grinding mill of timelines and missions..in short INSEAD has molded and polished the rough contours of your Self into a complete Professional, ready to tackle the killing fields of competition and comparison, prepared to fuse into the multifaceted realms of assugnments and projects without being restricted by borders or barriers of race, country, or language. You have truly become a Citizen of the World...

As you prepare to embark on a new phase of life on both fonts, professionl and personal, remember always: what you earned during the course of the year that went by, is education of the elite & training of the highest order, but what you will be putting into practice in the arena of duty hereafter, to derive and deserve true success will have to be a winning fusion of the knowledge you acquired at INSEAD with the values of Life you grew up with... for it is only when Knowledge is fortified with Character that Education succeeds in manifesting the Perfection in You...



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