 Mr. Chairman, ladies, gentlemen, colleagues, families and graduates, it is a pleasure and a honour to be addressing you today with a vote of thanks on this special occasion on behalf of SOAS Students' Union. Indeed, it is one of the most terrifying things I've ever done, so I hope you will forgive me if I slip. Anyway, today we are gathered here to celebrate your achievements and the end of the tremendous, exciting, difficult and rewarding journey that has been your undergraduate and graduate days here at SOAS. And it is an understatement to say that I am filled with great pride, thinking how far you have come in these three, four, five years, all the way from your first day of Freshers Week till this day of graduation, the pinnacle and endpoint of your time at SOAS. I know how hard all of you have worked to get to this point, how much sweat and tears and long hours in the library you have all invested to reach this landmark moment in your lives. As much as I feel like a proud parent watching you all sitting in your gowns today, I think first and foremost you should feel proud of yourselves. Congratulations for making it and to your families for having supported you through this long journey. I remember full well from when I was sitting there exactly a year ago in exactly the same spot as you today, that mixed feeling of excitement, accomplishment, slight melancholy and fear that comes with the moment of graduating from this amazing institution that has been our spiritual home for the last few years. Living SOAS, as they say, is never easy. Whether you are one of those types who have made the JCR and it's been back their second home and rely on the samosas from the bar as the first source of sustenance, or whether you have spent the best part of your SOAS, they stuck away in a corner of the library fighting to find a free computer with the only comfort of the soothing voice of the library announcement man that is incarnate in us accent reminds you every evening not to eat or drink and encourages you to cling on safely to your laptops. Wherever you've done, I'm sure that in one way or another you have all made this place your home at least a little bit and living home always comes with mixed feelings. I think it's fair to say that SOAS is not always the easiest place to navigate and it can be a source of many frustration and a headache but if you've made it here today it means that at least to some extent you've learned how to conduct yourself in the labyrinth of the SOAS admin and that in itself is a great achievement and I'm talking about all those times when you needed to have a form signed and you've been pinballed between the faculty office the registry and the office of that mysterious personal tutor of yours that somehow in three or four years you've never managed to meet or even get to know the name or those times or those times when your timetable magically expected you to be at both Russell Square and Venom Square at exactly the same time or when you downloaded a million journal articles sent them to print just to receive a chilling no-start event received staring back at you from the printer screen indeed as we know SOAS gets a lot of time to get used to and takes it all in terms of patience but it also gives back a lot and that's why I believe we all feel this mix of joy and sadness at the thought of leaving this place behind us there is something so unique about this place a uniqueness we could which goes beyond the aesthetic quickness of our murals in the JCR and our funny SOAS tree and that cuts deep through to the very ethos of this institution an ethos that no words can can quite capture in its complexity but that reverberates through and deep in the hearts of all of us who have lived and made this place ours it is not only about the diversity of our community and of the regions disciplines and languages that we engage with even if that is in itself a very unique and defining feature of our experience here an experience that nowhere else could duplicate for me it's first and foremost about the way in which we are intellectually challenged to question all of our beliefs and assumptions on a daily basis it is about the how of our learning process even more than about the what learning how to think critically engage in endless discussions on each and every topic from indonesian art to the arab spring to the complexities of the capitalist system of production and bringing those discussions and debates away from the classrooms and into the corridors the JCRs in our lives and even all the way on to overheard at SOAS sometimes maybe going one step too far in the heatedness of our arguments it is the blurring of that dichotomy between academia and life that makes our intellectual journeys here at SOAS so special and that make you the amazing minds that you are indeed SOAS embodies for me the true spirit of education by giving us a learning experience that manages to go beyond the mere instrumentalism of studying just with the aim of getting a good salary out of it and instead give center stage to ideas and values the real world out there are waiting for us it's not an easy one and often our generation is forced to conceive of everything in monetary terms as we get to know the price of everything and the value of nothing as they say and yet here at SOAS we have learned how to recognize and cherish the value and worth of simple moments of pleasure solidarity and friendship we have learned the value of helping each other out in moments of difficulty clinging on to each other to pull through the tough hurdles that studying and life put us through whether it's sharing a cup of tea and a cigarette with a complete stranger on a cold winter morning in the smoking area or trying to learn a few words of Spanish just to communicate with the cleanest we have grown to appreciate and love this unique embracing community of which we're all part as someone once said the sense of belonging that only university can give feels like the opposite of loneliness and let me reassure you that this sense of community and belonging is here to stay with you whatever your next steps may be as even if you might be leaving SOAS it is fair to say that SOAS never truly leaves you you are now becoming part of a wider family that stretches all over the world and there is endless days to be told about SOAS alumni bumping into each other in every corner of the world from Bangkok to Calcutta from King Shaza to Timbuktu and you will be able to recognize each other as the wandering nomads that we are and truly reminiscence about the amazing unique times we've had here but before you take the step and move on to the great challenges and opportunities that life has in store for you in the future take a moment to reflect on your accomplishments and on the complex mosaic of experiences that your time here has been whether it's been learning how to play a non- european instrument visiting refugees in detention centers picking up a whole new language from scratch representing SOAS on a sport pitch playing samba or marching in the streets during the student protests and the list is endless really you have all done amazing important things that you can be proud of in your time here indeed you have gone through university in some of the most tumultuous difficult times for our generation at a time where the government takes funding away from universities jobs as cars and our society seems to become day by day more unfair unjust and atomized and as much as this might feel don't it actually puts you in a unique position to look at the world with critical eyes and think about what type of person you wish to be in your life SOAS has taught us how to see and criticize the many ills in the world around us but also to recognize true beauty and to think critically about anything and everything and it has given us the courage to conceive of alternatives without being afraid of being looked down on as naive by the real world out there i encourage you all to never lose this period of possibility curiosity and passion that this great institution has endowed us with indeed we must cherish and cultivate it as it is one of the most precious gifts that we will take with us on our life journeys beyond these walls but i have no doubts that you will all do this as you are one of the most inspiring and passionate groups of people i've ever encountered and just looking at you here today feels me with great hope about the amazing thing that you will go on to do in the future my thanks go indeed out to you SOAS class of 2012 for having been patient with us throughout this sometimes challenging year and for having encouraged us as well as yourselves to always carry on even when everything seems too difficult to challenge to face i think i can honestly say on behalf of both myself and my colleague and inspirational friend Ali Khan that serving you this year has been a great honor and the most special experience we could have hoped for i've surely learned more about life friendship perseverance and acceptance throughout this year than at any other point in my life for this i thank you and for exactly the same reasons i would like to thank all the lecturers and members of staff and even management and who would have thought i would have ever said that that we have had the pleasure of working side by side with this year it is because of them their hard work and the passion that they display in their jobs that we have all been allowed to learn flourish and expand our horizons in the way we have on a personal level working with all of them has taught me above all how to accept appreciate and indeed cherish difference of opinion and even strong disagreement and has taught me how to turn it into a common strive for the greater good of our community our institution and our students now as SOAS overcomes the uncertainty through which has been put through but the myopic vision of the current government's education policy which proves itself incapable of recognizing the value of our arts humanities and social sciences and as we move towards a celebration of our first centenary as an institution i hope we will be able to meet again in a few years time to sit once again on the white steps recognize and celebrate together the value of our time here the value of everything we've learned and the importance of places like SOAS in this difficult world of ours but now it's time for you and your families to celebrate and rejoice in this special day once again congratulations and thank you