 Honda. Ladies, gentlemen and colleagues as well as graduates, it is an honour and great pleasure to present to you Desi Anwar as the recipient of the thatís an honourable fellowship at the school. Desi Anwar is a SOAS alumni. She studied at SOAS between 1987 and 1989 and received an MA in Tunisia .. ..and Malaya studies in 1989. Her father was a lecturer at SOAS. But Desi is also a prolific and iconic journalist, writer and artist in Indonesia. Her journalistic career began in 1990 when she joined Indonesia's first private television station, RCTI, and when it was still at its experimental stage, where she was appointed as the first anchor reporter for the program Seputar Indonesia, which very quickly grew into a daily prime time news program. She also anchored for the breakfast news, Nua Sanga Paggi, was executive producer of Indonesia's first English language news Indonesia today and had a weekly current issues documentary called Liputan Khusus. During this period, Desi interviewed many prominent leaders and public figures such as Benazir Buto, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, Mohamed Yunus, Jiang Zemin, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohamed and Pakistan's Pervers Musharraf. As a member of the Indonesian Presidential Press Corps, Desi travelled extensively going along state visits and attending international summits including the World Economic Forum. Desi Anwar left RCTI in 1999 to form a dotcom company called Astaga that helped to trigger the birth of internet portals and dotcom companies in the country. However, she was soon asked to help set up Indonesia's first 20 hour news channel Metro TV where she helped recruit and train news reporters, producers and anchors. At Metro, she produced and anchored the English language news bulletin Metro this morning and hosted weekly prime time current affairs, talk show programs dealing with political and economic challenges. Currently, she hosts the program Face to Face with Desi Anwar which serves as a platform for interviews with influential leaders in business and politics from around the world. Apart from her job as an anchor, Desi is a regular columnist for the news magazine Tempo and has been writing a weekly column for the English daily The Jakarta Globe since 2009. She is an avid new media user. Her Twitter account has around 275,000 followers and her tweets and photographs were published by Gramedia in a book called Tweets for Life in 2011. Committed to expanding journalism as a serious and important profession in Indonesia Desi helped to found various media outlets following the introduction of the Freedom Press Act in 1999 that was meant to remove tools for government control of the media in Indonesia. She has since launched the online magazine The Daily Avocado to showcase her articles and photography as well as her favourite articles on the internet. Desi has received many prestigious awards. She was voted the best news presenter by Citra Tabloid which is a popular magazine for Indonesian women for three consecutive years between 1994 and 1997 and won Panasonic awards for two consecutive years in 1997 and 1998 for best news anchor. In 1998 she was nominated as best anchor presenter by the Asian Television Awards and again she was a nominee for the Panasonic Award as best news presenter in 2004 and 2005. In 2010 Desi held the coveted number one press card from Indonesian Press Association for Generalistic Competency and Integrity and a year later was the recipient of the Watawan Utama or Senior Journalist Recognition Award from the Indonesian Press Council. In addition to her work as a journalist and an anchor Desi is a skilled and sensitive photographer. She has exhibited her photographic work in various venues and has published a book of photography and writings about her travels called A Romantic Journey. Desi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Sussex, England and also the Masters degree from SOAS as an aside her father was also a lecturer at SOAS. Desi's dedicated inspiring and creative work in the field of critical journalism has made her an icon in the Indonesian media. She is renowned for her criticism of Indonesia's socio-political situation and for championing the cause of freedom of the press and human rights. Here I would like to read a paragraph from one of her articles which rings through today at a time when different people all over the world from the Middle East to Brazil are using diverse forms of communications and citizen journalism to insist on the right to be represented and to have their voice heard. This is what she said in a column in the Jakarta Post which was published on her blog on the 6th of January 2012 and I quote Authoritarian governments are inclined to curb freedom of expression because this type of regime relies on the people's ignorance and fear for the legitimacy of their power. There is nothing more frightful to dictators than having an enlightened and thinking population that asks a lot of questions and demands answers for that would be the beginning of the end of the rule and the transfer of the power to the people. I chose this quote because it reflects the existential as well as critical conditions and discourses we academics and students are working with and through to understand the complexities of the situations in the global south which so us is concerned with. Chairman, it is my privilege now to present Desi Anwar for the award of the honorary follower of the school. Thank you Dina for those kind words and thank you Mr Chairman and thank you so as faculty for this honour. I'm greatly humbled, I'm very proud and to be dressed like somebody out of Harry Potter I feel absolutely special and of course congratulations to all of you graduating today and ladies and gentlemen of course the parents you must all feel very very proud and I had to say and it's no exaggeration when I say that so as plays it's very very close to my heart not only because I graduated here as Dina mentioned my father was a lecturer here and the first time I sat on the steps of so as and enjoyed my orange juice at the bar I was 11 years old so it's a long history for me and it's a great privilege and my mother she was also a librarian at so as and here's another thing my sister also graduated and so as this institution is very much dear to my heart and I but I certainly didn't expect to be back here and to receive this honour as a matter of fact the last time I was here it was over 20 years ago and actually let me just tell you a little bit about what happened to me since my so as graduation over two decades ago as when I started my career in television in Indonesia it was then in the dark ages you know no hand phones, no anything you have to listen to music and cassette you know I don't know whether you know what cassette players are did probably most of you not born yet or still in that piece at that time Indonesia had only one state-owned television and was controlled by the government news were good news and bad news were what happened in other countries and there's no advertising and the press was nothing more than a PR agency for the government and by chance I joined a new private TV station it was a small subscription based channel and it only came into existence because the owner was the son of the then authoritarian president Zuhato and he wanted to start a business and he thought you know why not start a TV business boy I'm sure if you knew what would happen he wouldn't have started that television business of course I had no idea about working in television let alone being a TV journalist as a matter of fact good thing is no one else had any real idea about making TV programmes but what was clear was we were not allowed to produce our own news programmes on the channel of course everything then was completely censored the press was censored however our combined ignorance proved a bonus not a setback I was basically given a carte blanche to produce whatever current affairs programme that my creativity could come up with as long as I didn't get the station into too much trouble so the only formula that I used in my sort of early days I did not do what the state channel was doing I thought you know it was very boring it was uninspiring and so in terms of content style and presentation I just did a complete opposite I was not afraid about experimenting and making mistakes because I reckoned if I didn't know any better nobody else would either certainly not the viewers and they were not used to anything other than TVRI the state's own channel then so we started producing an information programme and we called it a magazine because we were not allowed to use the word news so we came up with whatever stories we could find and yet rarely shown on television and you know what those stories were since we could not report on what the government officials were doing and we were not allowed to produce news we focused on putting the orderly man on the street with their everyday problems complaints, joists and tribulations or knew what the audience absolutely loved it and in less than a year RCTI became the largest most popular TV channel in the country other TV channels sprang up we never officially aired news but the high rating information bulletins we broadcast it so Putair Indonesia that was mentioned Nuanse Paggy and the lunchtime the midnight show it was actually everything news by definition except by name and suddenly even the government officials wanted to be covered by us so this is like in 2019 fast forward eight years later after the airing of our first magazine we were also the first to air reports on student protests across the country demanding president Suharto to step down and one of the directors of the station came up to me and told me that the owner asked him why we were airing reports and calls made by people for the president to step down on his TV channel so I told him well you know the president's son might own the station but the airtime I said belong to the public and the public by this time was used to eight years of getting real life real time and real information and the thing about information is once it's given to you it was no longer a privilege it became a right so 1998 president Suharto stepped down Indonesia became a democracy after 34 years of authoritarian rule and in the years that followed saw the shackles of the media removed once and for all and Indonesia's press emerged until now as the freest in the region now today there are 12 national TV channels hundreds of local channels and many cable and satellite channels many like the one where I currently work now focus on the on news and information Indonesia is also one of the most active users of the social media it has some of the biggest users of Facebook and Twitter there's a lot of trending topics come from Indonesia but what we have to remember is it wasn't too long that things were not that way and I am grateful to have been part of that history and seen how powerful media could be in putting the country on the path of democracy and how important freedom of expression is in keeping power in check and it certainly was not if it had not been for the birth of the television industry in Indonesia we would not have enjoyed the democracy that we have at this time and finally in my profession I often ask the famous people the secret to their success invariably I get answers on the lines of follow your dreams pursue your passion well in my case I certainly did not dream of the privilege of being back and honoured in so has as a matter of fact I can't remember ever having some grandiose dreams for anything really or the passion to change the world to a better place and looking back on it it was more sort of working with whatever that came my way one story at a time one show at a time one article at a time one project at a time pushing my luck that little bit further whenever it was possible embracing every opportunity that came my way but most of the time continuing moment by moment hopefully with enthusiasm optimism and lastly I just would like to share I climbed a mountain in Machu Picchu in Peru a couple of weeks ago is called the Putukusi mountain and to get to the top you have to climb up very steep ladders and vertical narrow steps they were never ending 1700 steps at 70 degree incline on the face of this lump of rock ok it was 2500 feet the whole idea of it was pretty daunting even pointless but once I got to the bottom the only thing to do was to go up one rung at a time and not think about anything except the little step beneath your feet before you know it you scaled a mountain and then you say to yourself wow did I really do that thank you