 That was the concluding presentation for the layer, ladies and gentlemen. Can I please call up on Professor Divi Farid to address the gathering now? It's a midnight test with destiny. Very interesting. I had promised all of you that I'll keep myself short. But the only way to ensure that I keep myself short is never to give a mic in my hand. When should do that, I'm sort of provoked to speak my mind. I'll still try to keep myself short. I'd like to begin by congratulating all of you. I think you have spent almost two months, eight weeks of six to eight weeks or whatever. Fairly rigorous activities here. And I hope you enjoyed that time. I also hope that you learned a lot of things which ordinarily you would not learn. You would notice that under pressure you would have learned faster than what you normally would. Ordinarily, as students, you would learn very fast when you are preparing for exams. But ordinarily, the adrenaline does not flow. Whereas when you work here and you work in teams, and you work under time constraints with the kunnas to actually produce some good deliverables, you do learn fast. I would suggest that you write down these learnings, contemplate on those and spread the news. I, you see, IITs have not fallen from the sky. There's fundamentally no difference between the people in other places and people here. All of us come from the same stock, students, teachers or whatever. All right, there is a performance requirement so the J.E. rank decides. But I have learned over the years not to give a damn to the ranks and marks because individuals can actually do wonderful things independent of how they work in academic performance. This internship itself is an example where when we started several years ago, this is all Professor Avinash out his idea, we used to select people based on only their academic performance. Then it dawned on us that creativity may exist in large number of people who are unfortunately not able to translate that into high academic performance. And that is where he came up with the idea of software quota where people who can demonstrate their creative talent are welcome here as interns. I wish the IIT system for regular educational admission also does something like that. It's not possible to individually interview over 250,000 learners who give the advanced J.E. So be that as it may, but that is how it is. However, what is fundamentally important to understand is that the ethos in IIT system is significantly different than the one which obtains in other institutions. I hope you have had a glimpse of that ethos. By the way you work, just take the simple example of making the departmental lab available throughout the summer vacation. No other institute will generally do that. No other institute will actually permit such large number of interns to descend on you. No other institute will be able to provide tens of mentors who will actually spend time with you, try to make you understand something different. The projects on which you have worked are all related to activities under the national mission of education through ICT. So let me tell you something that has happened very recently. We had a project review committee meeting assessing our projects here. And I don't know what they went back and reported, they were obviously very happy with this. Out of about 150 projects which have been executed or which are still being conducted under the national mission by many institutions, different PIs and so on, they shortlisted 10 projects which will be presented to an audience of all vice-chancellors of the country. There is a mega event that is happening in Delhi, about 1000 people are likely to participate, all directors of central institutions, IITs, NITs, all directors or equivalent deemed to be university vice-chancellors of autonomous institutions and all vice-chancellors of the university. And that 8th, 9th and 10th is the event, on 9th the President of India is going to inaugurate that 9th event where these 10 projects will be dedicated to the nation. So as I said, out of 150 they selected 10 and out of those 10, 4 are being conducted at IIT Bombay. Now that's a great privilege. You did not know it, we did not know it at that time. But the work that all of you have done is actually going into one or more of those 4 projects and that is the continuation. We have always held that while what you contribute is important, the fundamental objective of this entire exercise is to ensure that you return back more empowered than what you were when you came here. I hope that objective has been achieved. Don't let that empowerment be frittered away when you go back to your own ethos. Try to spread that ethos, try to talk to your colleagues, try to talk to your teachers. There is absolutely no reason why every institution in the country cannot actually emulate and establish the same ethos of an IIT. There is no reason. People cite rules, people cite whatever systems, whatever, whatever. One fundamental system which comes in the way is the standard university system where you have set syllabus, where the syllabus does not change, teachers are often not adequately prepared to guide. These are the problems. But it does not mean that students, if they work collectively, cannot bring about this change in ethos. I would charge you with that responsibility of going back to your own institutions and start talking about things. Start changing the mindset of people. Tell them that facing hard problems may lead to frustration and may lead to a lot of hard work. But at the end, the enjoyment that you have of having learned something and having contributed something is so beautiful that it's worth fighting for. Many of your colleagues and students and teachers in your colleges would not be interested in doing this kind of, this is a different kind of. So I would like you to spread that ethos as far as possible. I would like to leave with you a few tips for your professional lives. Although you are a couple of years away, you are just completed third year, right? So most of you will be completing your undergraduate studies in one more year, some of you in two more years. But then you will face the world outside. And when you face the world outside, believe me, the professional activities of the 21st century are going to be significantly different than what they were earlier. In the 20th century, most of the engineering students after finishing their degree course would take a job and do that job formally. Today we do not even know what is the nature of the job vis-à-vis the degree that you are. Particularly computer science, IT and electronics people will have to contribute to solving large and complex problems belonging to all other streams other than computer science. Except those of you who actually end up doing further research and studies in computer science itself. But your job mostly will be to build applications ranging from Internet of Things to other embedded systems, to sensors, to networks, to commercial applications, to financial sector applications, all kinds of things. And you will find that you will have to learn a new thing very quickly, absorb it and actually produce a good solution. So treat this as a glimpse of a training. If you thought that these two weeks or two months were full of hardship, lot of hard work, etc., etc. Please note that rest of your life you are going to work like this only. There is no difference. And therefore you will have to find time in that busy schedule of yours in your professional life to enjoy life as individuals, as families and so on. Balancing the act is not very easy. Many of us have been doing it for like 45 years. You will also do that and you will learn to enjoy, learn to mix business with personal pleasure, family trips, whatever. But more important thing is that as professionals you have to discharge certain responsibilities and acquire some trades which are not necessarily built in you when you do your conventional courses and pass your degrees. For example, the amount of rigor that is required in your activities that you do is very slip-shod in terms of the conventional education. I will just cite one example of rigor. It is a mathematical rigor. If you want to talk about three variables or three values which are unequal to each other, you say the values are A, B and C. The typical notation that you use is A not equal to B not equal to C. This is not rigorous enough because A not equal to B not equal to C does not guarantee that A is not equal to C. So the correct representation is A not equal to B not equal to C not equal to A. Even in mathematics books you do not find this kind of rigorous representation many places. I myself learnt it when I came here to do my m-take having done my undergraduate studies in a college elsewhere when a teacher not in maths but an electrical engineering professor told us this. Curiously, instead of teaching electrical engineering in the first lecture, he started by asking a question, prove route 2 is irrational. All of you would have come across this proof sometime or the other. But if you have not, it's not very easy to prove it by induction. You have to apply your mind, do something. So rigor has to be maintained in every activity that you do. Metaculousness is absolutely essential particularly when you deal with large segments of software. You remember I was asking questions on testing, version control. These appear to be simple names but they become lifeline. I'll give you an example of testing in real life in our own project that has happened. I was talking to Abhilash who is our senior administrator. You talk about Git by the way. How many people have used Git for version control? Several people. So have you learnt to use Ansible? No. So Ansible is actually a tool which is used to manage a whole lot of configurations. It is not really a tool for version control. That is one part of Git. The point is why is it that you have not heard of Git when you are studying in your colleges? What is so special about Git? Now that you have used it, you know how to use it. Why is it that it is not becoming part and parcel of learning? Git is not a matter of any syllabus in our courses also. But we have labs. We have labs called software engineering labs where you have to learn to use Git and you have to use it. Otherwise you don't pass that lab course. It may be just a three grade course. Go back and try to impress upon your friends and colleagues and teachers that such learning are useful. It is not Git. Today it is Git. Ten years later it may be something else. Ten years earlier it was something else. The point is regular rigorous mechanism of version control, regular rigorous mechanism of testing are very critical. So I was telling you about how testing can impact production systems. I was talking to Abhilash the other day and he was telling me, so we have actually the IIT Bombay X which is the open source platform. So there is a team called development team which is led by Aparna and others advised by Abhilash. There is a team which is building MI software for blended operations. He said that we launched IIT Bombay X on 26 January 2015 and till then he has had at most two or three problems. That was the rigor with which release is tested before it is released to production. On the other hand the MI system which of course has more functionality and it is outside the main core had umpteen problems perpetually. Reasons because there were perpetual demands on change in functionality and genuinely the team did not have sufficient time for testing but the team never put its foot down and said that unless I get two weeks for testing I shall not release this version. So this is the importance of testing particularly when you build large systems and you will be building large systems in life and building large systems does not mean writing 50,000 lines of code yourself. Building large system means discovering a million lines of code written in 100 different modules and then selecting them meaningfully connecting them with small lines of code that you write. This is the API method of building systems and that is what you will have to learn and do in future. It's not an easy thing. Thoreau understanding of basic concepts is absolutely essential. Saksint articulation is very important. I was very happy that the glimpses that I had people who were making presentations were making good presentations. Can you say the same thing about all your colleagues in your class back home? I have noticed that in most colleges in India the ability to articulate is not developed. Again, because there is no course in the syllabus which says except I think all of you had some communication skills course. First year taught by Humanities Department, neglected by everybody. And that is because you don't realize the value and importance of articulation. It's your ability to articulate both in written and verbal form which will permit you to communicate very succinctly to others and you will be communicating with thousands of professionals across the world and unless your written articulation is perfect you would have tremendous problem. Make sure that you develop that ability and retain that ability. Professional ethics is the last point that I would like to talk about. There are a lot of conflicts. Each generation has greater aspirations than the previous generation and this has been going on for 4,000 years of recorded human history and possibly for 10,000 years of all. That is the reason why people take competitive exams, people go to one institution over there, people choose CS over other disciplines, etc. It's a competitive world and therefore you choose this in the hope that individually you and your family can do very well or better than others by following this dream. Unfortunately these aspirations sometimes lead to short changing yourself in the long run. You may compromise this. You try to put your own aspirations of generating material wealth over your own long term interests and the long term interest is a professional life spanning 30, 35, 40 years. There are people in the computer science branch who have joined as professionals and in the first three years they have changed three jobs because somebody was offering better salary than the earlier one. There are people who actually sign a bond and break a bond as easily as possible. These are trades which are contraindicated to long term good professional life. Don't make a commitment easily but once you make a commitment even if sky falls on your head you shall not waver from that. That is the first fundamental professionalism, no matter what. So value systems, these are part of value system. I don't care if your value system is completely different from the one which is professed by your own family or professed by teachers like us. The point is do you have a value system? Do you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 principles which are principles? Once you call something a principle it is invalid. If you change that principle, if you compromise with that principle it is no more a principle. It was always a matter of convenience. You decided on these four principles to be your value system because it appeared convenient at that point. But five years later you suddenly find no, this principle is coming in the way of your progress in material life and then you are tempted to scratch that saying Oh, I thought it was a mistake. I will replace this principle with that principle. That is not a principle. So please develop your own professional ethics in an extraordinary fashion and this is the time when you can start doing it. You cannot do it later. Of particular importance is the fiduciary ethics or ethics related to money because money is the greatest character of thought. If I am not very careful I may be tempted to take some shortcuts which will violate some very fundamental principles which you yourself will not like that you have done it but you will do it because of that temptation. First time you fall to that temptation second time you will be encouraged Third time you will do it more and that is a guaranteed do. You may succeed in fooling a large number of people for 40 years of professional life but after 40 years when you retire will you be able to look yourself in the eyes in the mirror? Forget 40 years later. You will be able to do that even next week after you have done something wrong and that my dear friends you have to guard against the temptations because temptations related to money are enormous. There are people who will fudge bills you might have heard of so many gory stories people submit TA bills which are wrong TA bills. They forget that a TA bill is a reimbursement of the expenditure incurred and not a mechanism of earning money. There are senior corporate people who laughingly tell me that they have a car because car is the earning member of the family because their company gives them allowances. They do not have the truthfulness to say that I spend only so much money on my car and therefore I will not accept this. It does not happen. I will give you couple of examples of the poor example of what kind of should I say practices we are setting. So this is an example of a father who is shouting at his son. His son has stolen a few blank answer books from a school. He wanted blank papers to write rough work, whatever. He had some notebooks but these blank papers are a bunch. He stole it from the school. Specifically the school watchman caught him, reported it to the principal and principal reported it home and the mother was shouting at him and when the father came in she told father see your son has done this. Father was really mad with rage. Why did you do that? Are the papers which I bring from my office and give to you are not sufficient? What kind of role model are we putting in front of children? I think children are not sensitive enough to understand this. They make their own judgment and unfortunately they form a value system element in their mind. We say this is alright against this. Consider extreme examples. I don't know you all have heard of Sir Vishweshwariya who built the great dam and he was the divan of Mysore. He was on a tour and he was staying in a dark bungalow in a small town. Those days there was no electricity. So he had a laltin. In that laltin he was reading something and writing something. A friend of his came late evening to meet him and he greeted him and when the friend sat down he said just one minute. He went back, took out another laltin, lit it and extinguished the first one and the friend said why there was oil in that it would have still worked. He thought that oil is about to finish or something. Vishweshwariya laughed and he said that was government oil. This is my personal oil. Can you think of any better example of fiduciary responsibility than this? So please ignore any number of cases that you may see around you where people constantly fall to the temptation of taking shortcuts and compromise. Ignore that. Learn to establish a fiduciary responsibility to yourself and remember you must not only do correct things but they must also appear to be correct. Here is an example that I learned from a colleague of mine Professor Sinha was a warden of hostel 7 and during one summer I found him frequently going to hostel 1 to eat his lunch. So by the way hostel 1 food was known to be the best because it was the post graduate hostel at that time which means all rich people. Only post graduate students got scholarships. Others had to depend upon the money sent by their parents. So the mess bill in other hostels used to be 92, 94, 95 rupees per month. In hostel 1 it used to be 106, 107 and so on. But hostel 7 food was also known to be very good food. So I was just curious and one day when I met him on the road he was coming back from hostel 1 and I was coming out of the old computer science building and moving towards my home and I said Sinha sir, he was known to visit his hostel twice a day. It was that meticulous. So I said Sinha sir, you get good food at hostel 7 why are you going to hostel 1? And you know what he smiled and said Patak sir, everyone will see food in my hostel but no one will see it giving money. See he would pay for everything that he would eat. He would do so even in hostel 7. But he is concerned that 100 students will see him eating in hostel 7 and many of them may presume that because he is warden he is eating free here. Contrast it to several wardens who actually enjoy free lunch and dinner. Now this is an example of amazing correctness of the fiduciary behavior. I would strongly suggest that since you have not yet been tempted by real life you know for all 30, 40 years you will have such temptation. Right now try to form some principles around these and keep these in mind. And remember once you define a principle you have it is invalid. I have built my own life on three simple principles which have not violated. It has not violated till the end of my life. I think you should make such principles. And the last thing I would like to say is my favorite. You all heard of the word dew. You have seen dew drops. They look beautiful on the petals of trees or flowers. I have a special interpretation for the letters of the word dew. For me D stands for dreaming big. As late Dr. Abdul Kalam said you dream small your achievements will be limited. You dream big. You may not achieve the biggest dream but you will work much harder and go to much higher high. So dream big in everything that you do. For example attempt to become an entrepreneur is considered very risky and is not tried by most youngsters either because they themselves don't want to take risk or their parents don't want them to take the risk. Going forward in this country we would require a much larger number of entrepreneurs to come up. The city of Bangalore today is full of startups and what are those startups? They all have some interesting queer ideas. They want to build business on it and they are working hard on it. Sometimes they may fail, sometimes they may succeed. But ability to take risk and doing something is a different flavor. So I would like you and your friends to think about those things. But dream big in any case. The later E for me stands for enjoying life. You must enjoy every moment of life. Whatever you are doing, you are working, you enjoy that work. You are playing a football match, you enjoy that. You are watching a cricket match on TV, you enjoy that. You are fighting with a friend, enjoy that. You are arguing with your brother, sister, father, mother, enjoy that. Enjoy everything. Why? Because every instance that comes goes away and it will never return back. Time is extraordinarily different from any other commodity. Any other commodity you lose, you can reacquire it. You lose money, you can re-urn it. But time once lost is gone. It will never come back. So every instance is precious. And therefore don't ever let any kind of frustration that hits you on any day to prolong. Because when you prolong that frustration, that frustration results in hurt and aches in your mind. And you may spoil not one moment, not one day, but one week or maybe a month just getting frustrated. It's not worth it. I've had a simple principle which has helped me. Whatever calamity happens, I feel like crying. I cry, I shout at the world whatever, whatever that day, that evening. I go to sleep and next day morning when I get up and I see the sun rising, I say, ah, a beautiful day. You must not permit more than 24 hours to elapse before you have recovered from any failure. Failures will happen. Failures will happen. Life is not hunky-dory. Not everything will work. But recovering from that failure very quickly is important. So remember this. Enjoy life. Every instance, every moment, every day, whatever you do, that will keep you happy. And the last W is for working hard. People smarter than us have attempted for 4,000 years to find a substitute for hard work. None has succeeded. If you want to achieve something great because of your great dreams, if you want to enjoy every moment of life and yet make those achievements, the only way you can do that is by working hard. So dream big. Enjoy life and work hard. And this is an IIT style question paper. Any two of the three is not an option. Why I say this is because I've been saying this year after year, about 15 years ago, there was a student, a batch of students who had joined different jobs. And they used to regularly come and say hello or something like that. And one of them I said, hey, such and such fellow is working in that company. Where is he now? Oh, you don't know, sir. He was thrown out of that company after one year. I was quite surprised. He was a smart fellow. He said, sir, he took your advice of dreaming big, enjoying life and working hard very, very seriously. Except that he did only one of the three things. He enjoyed life. So anyone or two out of the three is not required. You have to dream big. You have to enjoy life and you have to work hard because then only you will create history. And please remember this. Every one of you, every one of 1.2 billion Indians is capable of creating history. You just have to say that I will do something extraordinary in life and you will do it. It doesn't matter what marks you ever had, what grades you scored, which college you study from. It does not matter. It's just your mind which says that, okay, our next 30, 40 years I'll do something extraordinary, something big. And you will do it. That's all I have to say. Thank you so much. And once again, congratulations.