 Mae'r ysgolwm yn ddweud, wrth gwrs, ddweud a'r ysgolwch yn 2015. Mae'r ymdweud yn ymdweud, Caerbyn I. Dyna'r ystafell ar gyfer y byddech chi i'w ddechrau yn ddweud y newid yn gwneud yr ysgolwch yn y pethau'r ysgolwch. Dyna'r ystafell ar gyfer y byddwch yn ddweud y dyma'r ysgolwch yn ddweud. Let me start by mentioning all the people who made today and our time here at SOAS so special. To the academic staff who have inspired us, to the non-academic staff who built a base on which we could prosper, to the management who served graciously as our favourite enemy, to the outsourced cleaners, maintenance, caterers and security staff who kept this place afloat. To the parents and carers who have guided us and to the amazing graduation team who have made this day a day to remember. I would also like to say my personal thanks to my amazing student union colleagues who have worked with a passion to make this year as typically SOAS as possible. And finally, although you couldn't make today's this afternoon's ceremony, I would also like to say a special thank you to Paul Webley, the Vice Chancellor of SOAS who is stepping down this year. For his hard work, his patience and his honesty, he will always be remembered. So please again join me in giving him a round of applause. Next year, SOAS will turn 100. Over the last century, SOAS's identity has undergone some startling changes. What began famously as a colonialist project training civil servants for the most humid regions of empire, has since seen that humidity brought to our campus by none other than the SOAS hippies, who exercising that same imperial sense of adventure managed to assemble a secret sauna using hot water kettles and incense in the deep dark SOAS basements. What was a rewarding recruiting ground for MI5 and MI6 in the 30s and 40s, later drew the attention of spies of very different denominations. Ranging from the Shire Iran's dreaded Savak to boss apartheid South Africa's notorious secret services, what seemingly drew the attention of those formidable nasty agencies was that SOAS, in their eyes, was one of the key places where the overthrow of their states was potentially being planned. Whether those fears were baseless or not, what had started as an institution to perpetuate the British Empire did become, in the post-colonial era, a centre where teachers and students confronted the dark and questionable legacy of imperialism. If SOAS was a bastion of the marginal left in the 60s and the 70s, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw yet another shift. Communists, real or imagined, became increasingly marginal in the eyes of Western security agencies. This didn't prevent our comrades from trying to sell you their party newspaper. Nevertheless, the tradition of questioning the powers that be, of challenging various kinds of status quo, remained strong, and in an age of unchecked free marketeering, SOAS simultaneously became a bastion of everything that wasn't neoliberal, while also paradoxically holding some of the keys to an increasingly globalised and market-orientated world. In the 21st century, SOAS is a peculiar mix of all these various identities, or perhaps we are a school perpetually in search of an identity. The question lies in, what is this identity, and how does its definition connect with us as students, or more importantly now, us as graduates? For some, it is the desire many have here to work in the development and growth of the global south. For others, it is the will to learn a foreign language that will not only let one speak, but even think and reason through a culture and medium previously unknown. For others still, it is the law of emerging and established markets of Africa and Asia and their important relationship with the rest of the world's economy. Identity, however, is of course extremely personal, and our own sense of self no doubt influenced the ways in which we connected with SOAS as an institution and SOAS as an idea. For me, as a British Asian, SOAS was the first place I'd been where I felt truly proud of my heritage, where my identity felt at one with SOAS's identity. Finally, there was a place that confronted the colonial narratives of Orientalism, challenging Eurocentricism in everything from notions of beauty, political and historical logic, to acknowledgments of the rich cultural and artistic worlds that exist beyond our Western reality. And then, there was the aggressive, often amusing flipside of this identity coin, where those who claimed to fight for liberation were also guilty of hypocrisies, of not understanding intersectional identities and structures in their own meta-narratives. A telling tale of this happened in my first year, in which I'd written an article for a student society's publication. The article was on the benefits of multiculturalism in the UK, in which my only criticism was to specify the difference between arranged and forced marriages, stating that the latter was something that the left needed to oppose. The British editor, a man with limited knowledge of South Asians in Britain, got back to me saying he understood my point but had to cut the section on forced marriage as it could fuel racism against the Asian community. This incident, as funny as it was sad, reminded me of one of the most famous quotes in post-colonial literature. Gayatri Spivak, in reference to the campaign to end widow burning in 19th century Bengal, wrote that was actually white men saving brown women from brown men. Well, at SOAS, in this post-colonial era, were in the bizarre position where a white man was offended by a brown man's solidarity with brown women because apparently that would be racist. That unhelpful side of our political awakening was however mostly marginal. For what the SOAS student body is most famous for is the depth and rigor with which we have conducted our political activity. Student societies like SOAS detainee support who fight for the rights of asylum seekers held in inhumane detention centres across the UK. The campaign to free Gonshig Avami, a former SOAS student who was jailed in Iran for watching a volleyball match. The movement against ISIS and the fight for Kobani told through the Kurdish diaspora here at SOAS. Campaigns divest from fossil fuels and the boycott of institutions complicit in the occupation of Palestine and finally the Justice for Cleaners campaign which is one of fair living wage and pension for the still outsourced cleaning staff here at SOAS. Were all examples in which we as students could not simply relegate what we were taught in class but actively engaged in a world that would be shaped by the challenges we now face. Indeed these challenges can broadly be defined into two categories. Personal challenges for us as individuals and global challenges for humankind. The two are independent of each other and yet there are small overlaps to be found in the ways in which we might find solutions. For while our immediate futures may be one of repaying our student loans, unemployment or miserable employment and debt, the world's challenges also one of debt repayments, bailouts and global austerity to balance the books. And indeed while one should never shy away from being financially stable there are some things in life both personal and geopolitical where it's not always possible to balance the books. Things that cannot be bailed out, times where money is not enough. We cannot bail out the environment and climate change. That solution lies in the global reduction of all of our carbon footprints both individually and communally. We cannot bail out human rights and the fight for equality as history proves the fight to end intolerance is one of changing minds not checks. And finally we cannot bail out the freedom to live the life that we had imagined for ourselves before the practical pressures of the real world squeeze our dreams and dent our ethics. In fact the contrast between the choices we make as individuals and the choices we make as a society we put to us for the rest of our lives. Perhaps the answer to balancing this choice lies in our SOAS identity a fluid identity, an inclusive identity that has taught us to express our individual characters while also maintaining a social responsibility to a wider world. And ultimately like many before you you too have been part of constructing this ever elusive SOAS identity and wherever you may be you will continue to be an essential fragment of its ongoing story. Finally let me end by congratulating you for making it this far. Good luck for the future. I hope you the class of 2015 will remember SOAS as fondly as it will remember you.