Good afternoon everyone. Our chief guest, Mrs. Smriti Irani, former Minister of Education of India, Professor Ramgopal Rao, Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani, Karan Chakravarti, Registrar BITS Pilani, Dean Professor Sarvanan, distinguished guests, faculty, class of 2026, and of course, proud parents.
First and foremost, thank you, Smriti ji, for joining us today. Your journey in many ways is a shorthand for defined courage, as I call it. And it is best captured in Dushyant Kumar's immortal lines that I believe you too have invoked in the past: 'Kaun kehta hai aasman mein suraakh nahi ho sakta? Ek patthar to tabiyat se uchhaalo yaaron.'
Few public figures embody that spirit as completely as she does. Her journey stands out for its depth and range, from an extraordinary successful career in media and entertainment to entrepreneurship as a producer, and then on to public life with a sustained focus on youth, education, and the welfare of women and children.
Along the way, she has consistently broken new ground, first by redefining the grammar of Indian TV channels and serials, and later by becoming one of the youngest ministers in the cabinet. She is also the first woman to have held portfolios as large and diverse as Human Resource Development and Textiles.
What makes her presence at today's convocation especially meaningful is what her journey signals to all of you, our graduating class, which is: careers are rarely linear. They are often shaped by the willingness to step into the unknown in a world that often rewards predictability. Here is a story, hers is a story that argues for courage, and I will talk about courage a little later in my address. Smriti ji, thank you so much for being here.
Class of 2026, your batch has left a mark on campus life. I have heard about interesting stories, the naming of the bridge connecting the sports ground with the Center of Excellence as Ramsetu. I was wondering where that came from. In fact, even Lord Ravan wondering how that name happened. I believe the tracks to D-Mart has stopped because you now have Swiggy and Zomato and the like delivering on campus.
I most importantly heard about the Holi shindig where the water in the campus ran out and we had technical souls roaming around and three hours of washing to get people back to their original status. So clearly, as we hope, all of you have studied hard, worked hard, and also had a fun time in your MBA.
From festivals to sports, I am told that also about BIT BITN Premier League, BPL. I hope that one day BPL gets popular even outside our campus walls, and you never know, it might just happen. In all fairness, I am told that your cohort has set a benchmark academically, creatively, and through your remarkable resilience.
This class, your class, stands at a very rare intersection. You had the distance to study a world in turmoil. Now you step into it. You are going to be, by default, far more capable than any other generation before you. That is because you have something at your fingertips that looks a lot like super intelligence.
It can explain, analyze, simulate, critique, and can compress years of learning into just hours. The distance between knowing nothing and being useful at something has been compressed unbelievably. Every answer is now just a question away, which I think is both liberating and also sometimes unforgiving. And this is only the beginning.
Elon Musk says, and I am sure you all have heard it, that AI could be smarter than any single human at anything by the end of this year, and by 2030, smarter than the sum of all human beings put together. Just pause on that for a moment. If that is even directionally true, the impact is hugely, hugely consequential.
It is today easier than ever to start something, as in a new business. The barriers that once held back entrepreneurs, like access to expertise, to capability, to speed, are all collapsing. It is easier than ever to change tracks. Careers will not be locked into early choices. You can reskill, retool, and re-enter faster than ever before.
And in whatever you choose to do, you can operate at the level of effectiveness that until recently would have taken entire teams many years to do. Class of 2026, we are moving into an age of abundance, an overwhelming abundance of information, tools, and capability.
So in a world where everyone has access to intelligence, the advantage will come from, obviously, something else entirely: who moves and who doesn't. In other words, who has momentum.
Momentum is a very strange thing. You never notice it when it starts, but after some point, the nature of what comes your way becomes perceptibly different because momentum builds on itself. It compounds, and one stretch leads to another. The visibility expands, the circle widens. You meet people you were meant to meet much later in your career. You are trusted a little earlier than you perhaps should be.
And if you keep showing up, maybe imperfectly but consistently, your trajectory of your career begins to change slowly. Give it time, and the momentum hits escape velocity. Two people can begin exactly at the same place. You cannot tell them apart, not as at the start. But as the clock moves forward, the one who keeps stepping just beyond their reach begins to pull ahead. At first, it's barely visible. After 10 years, there is a gap, and after 20 years, there is a gulf.
Momentum also expands what you see. It expands what sees you as well. It changes the scale at which you operate, and over time, it changes what people believe you are capable of handling, which in many ways is what determines the velocity of your career.
So how do you generate that momentum? And that too in the age of AI, what does it look like? I think it takes three qualities. The very first is courage. When a situation, circumstance is alarming, daunting, or sometimes even frightening, there is one quality that decides whether you stay and engage or you turn and run. And that quality for me is courage.
I have a business definition for courage. Courage is the ability to act decisively so that you control change. Leaders with the courage to anticipate change and decide where to act, how to act, emerge victorious time and time again. So, please remember that. All of you will also be wrestling with a world that will demand courage and doggedness. And in such a world, courage creates momentum. It gets you moving even before the path is clear. Think of courage as a muscle, one that you have to keep using convincingly, consciously, and with will.
Now, courage sets you in motion, but in a world that refuses to stand still, that's always in flux, something else determines whether you can keep going ahead. And that is, for me, versatility, my second pillar. The arc of your career will demand far more versatility than it did in our generation. The pace of change is now structural, and the internal architecture of firms, the way they work, the way they recruit, the way they interact with their shareholders, is being completely re-engineered.
Which means obviously that career paths will also be much more prone to disruption. A new kind of professionals are being greatly valued, and I call them the 'versatilists'. These are people who think in first principles and are not bound by any rulebook. They can move across contexts, they absorb new realities quickly, and they can pivot without losing coherence.
So versatility ensures that as the ground shifts, as it inevitably will in your careers, you are not anchored to what was, but adaptable to what is and what is going to be. And finally, the third quality is empathy. In the age of AI, intelligence itself is becoming abundant and therefore less distinctive. The real scarcity, and therefore the real premium, will be on empathy.
This may seem counterintuitive because after all, we have never been more connected. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Indians spend on an average five hours daily on their smartphones, much of which is in consuming or producing content. So by any conventional measure, interactions and connections are booming.
And yet, something more elemental appears to be in retreat, and that is the feeling of being understood. And that is where empathy enters the frame. As technology permeates life and work, the ability to read context, exercise judgment, and build trust with people you work with becomes more and more valuable.
Machines scan, as we know, process information, and even simulate conversation, but they cannot confer dignity, and they cannot recognize what is unsaid. Sociologist and author William Bruce Cameron captured very neatly. He said, 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' So empathy firmly is in that latter category. It will not be automated. It definitely can't be commoditized.
And in a world which is busy building more and more powerful CPUs, your task is to build what I call your own HPU, which is your own Human Processing Unit. And in the years ahead, that I think is what will set you apart.
So to summarize: courage will get you moving, versatility will keep you relevant, but it is empathy that will determine whether others choose to move and work with you or not. I believe that the future most definitely will not be shaped by those who know the most. The future belongs to those who have the courage to choose, the versatility to adapt, and the empathy to connect.
Batch of 2026, this moment is yours. Now it is simply a question of what you choose to set in motion. Thank you once again for our chief guest, Smriti ji, for being with us, our Dean Professor Sarvanan for his outstanding leadership of BITS Pilani, and the world-class faculty of BITS Pilani that has shaped your journey into one of impact and promise. Congratulations, students.
