 A very good morning to you all. I am Dr. Hawoy from the Department of Political Science. Welcome you all to the first post-graduate convocation ceremony of the college. I begin the convocation ceremony with a very popular quote, which is, graduation is not the end, it's the beginning. And it is a real privilege and an honor to host this special event for celebrating the two years of rigorous hard work and dedication of our post-graduate students of political science and English. So to begin this ceremony, I would request our principal ma'am, the commencement speaker, Dean of Social Science, Dr. Temps-Kumla, and the HOD of English, Dr. Rosy Depp, for the tradition of authoring the Tree of Hope. The post-graduating badge of 2023 found the strength to persevere, to believe in their abilities, and to view each HOD as a chance to learn, to enthrime in the field of studies for two rigorous years. It is hoped that encouraged the post-graduates here today to chart their own course, to think innovatively and to dare to dream big as the college has always pursued each of us, the strive for excellence as its motto. The Tree of Hope that we see here today will therefore be planted in the college campus in commemoration of year badge of 2023. Now I call upon Dr. Puchong Tai for the prayers of blessing. Will you please take your time? Let's take this moment of prayer. Almighty Heavenly Father, we give you all glory and honor for who you are and what you are to us. Lord, you have been so good to us all throughout the semester, and today this is truly a day of celebration for us. At this moment, we come before you with our open hearts and pray that your unfailing love should be continued to be in this institution. Your unfailing love should be continued to be with the teaching staff, the non-teaching staff, and to be with each and every students of this college. We pray for the graduates who are here this morning. May you continue to give them the knowledge and wisdom in mind from above. May you give them the strength to do their best and most importantly, love. Give them the hope and the faith to guide them wherever they go and whatever they do. We also remember students who are not here today and who could not make it this time. Lord, may you give them the courage, strength, the good health so that they will glorify your name through this access. I also pray for the short events today, Lord, and invite your Holy Spirit in our midst and help us to place true all the participants. We commit everything, our life, and your loving care in Jesus' most precious name I pray. Amen. Thank you, Dr. Kucong. May the grace of God be always be upon us and we are always grateful for all the good things that is around us. Now, I want to take the honor of introducing the commencement speaker for this event, Dr. Yanveni Yantan. Beni Sumer Yantan. She is an assistant professor at the Center for Naga Tribal Language Studies, Naga University. Her area of study includes oral tradition of the Nagas, folklore, vernacular literature, the study of language and culture, and critical theory. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have been featured in various national and international spaces such as Wright, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Muse India, Art Luke, Telangana, Ismoso, Sapiens, The Bangalore Literature Review, and among others. She has also contributed writing to various anthologies and collections. She has also served as an assistant professor in the Department of English Dessert College. Also, I would like to say that she is also the co-editor of the Anglo-Naga Language Dictionaries, in particular, Anglo-Lothal, Sumi, Pom, Yimkin, so far, funded by Tribal Research Institute, Directorate of Art and Culture, Koima. Ma'am, we are extremely delighted and honored to have you here with us in this momentous journey of our lives. We welcome you all. We welcome you to this college for these auspicious occasions. Now for the next, we want the next one to have a college and tent and a plate for these I ask all of you to rise up from your seats. I request our principal, Ma'am, to come up to the stage and give a gift to our commencement speaker, Oryan Oryantam. Ma'am, you may please stay back for the principal's address. Good morning, everyone. Respect the chairperson, our Honorable Commencement Speaker, Dr. Oryantam. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Chairperson, our Honorable Commencement Speaker, Dr. Oryan Beniyantam, Assistant Professor from the Center for Naga Tribal Language Studies, Naglain University. Parents, gargants, students, and staff who are present here this morning. I warmly welcome you all to the PG Convocation Ceremony, 2023, for the School of English and Political Studies. We are so proud of our students who have made it this far and gone through two years of rigorous study at Dezo College to be graduating this year. And before I proceed any further, I'd like to give thanks to God for allowing us to witness this important occasion, for allowing us to witness the graduation of our students and for us to be able to gather in this manner this morning to observe this special day. The success of our students today is the success of the entire Dezo College community and all of its stakeholders, which includes the parents, the families, the gargants, all past and present teachers, everyone who has been a part of molding our students into the person that they are as they sit here this morning. So we thank every one of you for being a part of molding and shaping these student lives. And I'd like to especially thank Dr. Yanbeni Yantan for agreeing to come here and address our graduating batch of students. First and foremost, Dr. Yanbeni Yantan is a good friend of mine. She is an intellectual. She is a prolific writer. And of course, she is an assistant professor at the Center for Naga Tribal Language Studies at Nagila University. Our chairperson has already introduced her to us, but they have been doing amazing work by bringing out publications, dictionaries, studying Naga languages. And so much more. So we appreciate Dr. Yanbeni for taking all the time to be here this morning and we really look forward to hear your address to the students. For this PG batch for the class of 2023, we have 21 graduates from the Departments of English and Political Science. 13 of them are from the English program and eight students from the Political Science program. This morning, I would like to just share a few words to our graduating batch before we send you out into the world. Last month, we witnessed the graduation of 521 UG students. And I told them the same thing. So I'm going to reiterate what I mentioned to them last month. The first thing is that the Tzol College degree cannot be simply bought. It is a degree that is earned through the hard work, through the efforts and the sacrifices that you have all put in to make it this far. It is also a degree that is meant to give you greater confidence but not arrogance. A degree that is meant to make you feel wiser but also kinder and more humble and more sensible individuals who will know how to make better decisions and who will know how to stand up for what is right. And most importantly, who will know how to have an even greater thirst and curiosity to continuously exploring the world around you and learning. And I say continuously because learning never ends. It does not stop here with your degree. It continues on until we all grow old. All of us, teachers, students, parents are learning every single day. And that is exactly what we mean by striving for excellence. And I believe that all of you will carry forward the mission and vision of Tzol College which is to empower yourself and the people around you towards lifelong excellence so that you can all go out and create a positive impact in this world. Life is short and life is very unpredictable. One moment you may be sitting comfortably at the top and the next moment you may find yourself at the bottom. No one but God knows our future. But what can we do at the most? At the most we can live our life to the fullest extent with every single day that we have. Please use this one lifetime that you have to explore everything at a deeper level. Questions of who you truly are, what you would like to be and how do you want to contribute meaningfully with the life that you've been given. You will now be our alumni and we hope that you will continue to keep in touch with your teachers, with the college. We have great expectations for you to become leaders in our society and we hope to be meeting you and acknowledging you as Tzol alumni who have gone on, as I mentioned, to create this great impact in our society. So on this note, I would just like to conclude by wishing you all the very best I wish you all a very bright and prosperous future ahead and lastly, please do continue to keep in touch with the college and reach out to us, visit us and do let us know what you're up to because we will always be more than happy to hear from you, not only hear from you, to work with you someday here at Tzol College. Thank you very much. Our valedictorian for today's event, Miss Binu K. Sarma, I'll look into her brief educational background. She completed high school from Regimental School, Kohima, with a score of 74 percentage. Her higher secondary from Mount Harmon, Kohima, with a score of 86 percentage. She was placed amongst the top 20 by the Navelin Board of School Education. She completed her graduation from Kohima College. She joined Tzol College in 2021 in the Department of Political Science. Her CGPS score is 7.44. She is the top in political science from the college. Now I call upon Miss Binu to come up to the stage and give her valedictorian speech. A very good morning to you all, respected principal, Dr. Havasaila King, our commencement speaker, Dr. Yanlinian Tan, Director, Dean, each of these professors of respected department, all the esteemed guests, families, and my friends. For monthly, I want to extend my greatest gratitude to all of my DIGA and also congratulate all my fellow successful post graduates. Today, as I stand here as a valedictorian student, I feel very honored and privileged and is overwhelmed to convey my sincere regards and gratitude towards the position I stand. I'm Binu Sama from the Department of Political Science, scheduling 7.44 CGPA post-graduate of 2023. Indeed, political science as a subject, itself varying from its concept to the theories of philosopher, was not an easy read for me as well. However, understanding the subject matter, emphasizing and analyzing within has helped me to score better reads. Well, my role to success is in fact an outcome of dedications, as I do not matter the hours invested by the quality of knowledge. For manifesting, or just a past mark to a topper, has been through my hard work, keeping the consistency along with smart work. I remember myself once volunteering if people could do it, why do not I? And today, I am glee to stand here, proving that there is always a room of success through dedications and hard work. As Helen Keller says, optimism is a fate that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. However, it is also an untenable fact that the college has been very helpful not only in nurturing and reading the students, but also to develop broader knowledge through seminars, workshops, co-curriculum, and so forth. The college also provided fields and opportunities for combined interaction classes, presentations, internships, exertions, authentic library and as such, which has been a useful tool for developing my learning process and experience. Further, I would also like to make a few upgrades. So, firstly, I extend my gratitude to DevSol Village for organizing this wonderful event and a lot of appreciation for all the present days present here today. Secondly, I owe my overwhelming gratitude to all the professors of TensorFlow College, especially to the Political Science Department, who have sprinkled not only the knowledge of syllabus, but also personally guided me when I was needed. Thirdly, I am very pleased and thankful to my parents, my brother, and my friends who have immensely supported me during these two years of journey and success. As a growing student, I always aspired to be a professor and today I'm honored that I'm on its path. These successes have in fact prepared me for what I ought to be and I'm always passionate about teaching. Further, I would also like to encourage and convey a short message to my juniors to have strong determinations, work hard, and be goal-oriented for has every good consequences there must be a consistency. Lastly, I wish a successful interview to all my fellow mates. Though our ways may part here, but a beautiful beginning awaits at the another door for each one of us. Thank you, strike for excellence. I'm sorry, Miss Dider, you have to come back to accept your token of appreciation from us. To do this honor, I call upon the Dean of Social Science, Dr. Tem Sukomla coming to the most awaited part of the event which is the award of degree which is to be conducted by Dr. Rosy Temp, Head of Department of English. So I ask her to come over the stage to begin the commencement process. Okay, greetings everyone. First of all, I convey my heartfelt congratulations to the graduating class of 2023 on this significant accomplishment. We believe in your potential and we look forward to witnessing your continued success. For the commencement exercises, I request Dr. Yanbin Yantan, our commencement speaker to kindly do the honors. Do the graduating class of 2023 as you step forward to receive your hand-hard-earned degree certificates. Remember that this represents not only the culmination of your academic endeavors but also the beginning of a new chapter in your lives. Each certificate signifies your dedication, your perseverance, and commitment to excellence. The following students have been assessed and evaluated by Detsaw College and Narnia University and are hereby being awarded the postgraduate degree in arts in English and political science respectively. Continuing with political science, as I call out your name, please come on stage and receive your degree. Continuing with MA English, we begin with a long jar. Thank you, ma'am. May I now kindly request Dr. Yanbin Yantan, our commencement speaker, to take over the time and address the audience with her insights and wisdom with the gathered assembly. Good afternoon, everyone. Our respected chair, Dr. S. Hawai, principal Dr. Havasalaurin, distinguished teachers and faculty of Detsaw College, relatives and friends of the graduating class of 2023. Thank you, future entrepreneurs, future academics, future thinkers, future bureaucrats, future teachers graduating today. As a teacher and a researcher myself, it is both a delight and honour for me to deliver this commencement address in a ceremony that is as solemn and important as this one in the life of a student. And for this, I thank Detsaw College for extending this very warm welcome and hand of invitation. I, as Dr. Hawai has mentioned, I worked at the Department of English in the year 2016 from January to March. Although it was only for a period of three months, I had the pleasure of making some amazing friends and colleagues, some of whom I am still in touch with today. So I was happy to see Dr. and unfortunately I did not see Anjan who was supposed to be here. So this convocation when Dr. Lorien asked me to be the commencement address, first of all, I was thinking, it's going to be so hot I'm not used to the steam opera heat. So, you know, please forgive me if I'm sweating so much profusely because I'm just not used, even if it's an AC, I think I need to be inside a freezer. So basically I was thinking what this convocation reminds me of and, you know, in the study of anthropology there is a in the study of especially ritual practice and the study of what we call the rights of passage, right? Which is basically a set of practices, ceremonies, observations or observances that any community circumscribes as part of this life system. This right of passage is a marker of social change of the individuals who are undertaking this right of passage. So in the past in the Naga society there were different kinds of rights of passage. We had puberty rituals, we had death rituals, right? Then we had marriage, death, certain milestones as some of you might know we had the social gena, right? So we had these are some of the ways through which, you know, social relations were fostered and, you know, social dynamics were mapped. In Lothar society, we had this Feast of Merit and it was called Osho. So where the individual was allowed after performing the first right of Feast of Merit you are allowed to use the red and white shawl which is called the pangrub shawl. So while today in Naga society we do not observe rituals in the strict anthropological sense of the word. This kind of ceremony like a graduation ceremony acts and behaves as a kind of initiation from one world to the other world. From the world where you are a student and from now and you are going to move into another world, right? So this phase that you are in right now it's what anthropologists would term a liminal phase. A liminal phase of neither here neither there. It's a space between where your identity transformation is taking place. So when you think of this context you know that whatever it is you are going to see a change, a change in your identity because you are no longer students anymore you are no longer postgraduate students but now you are going to enter into a world you are preparing yourself to step out into the world as a result at home in the world. So I take this opportunity to share a few worldly wisdoms that I have absorbed in the various trajectories of my life as a teacher, a scholar, a daughter, a sister and a friend. These thoughts and ruminations are not meant only for the graduates today but I hope it will also serve as reminders for the rest of us gathered here today of the fallibility of the human condition of the nature of human desire and ambition the implications of our choices on ourselves and on others and the complex ways in which, especially in Naga society how the personal and the social impact and intersect with each other, especially when it comes to making our decisions. To begin with I would like to draw on something that I feel is very important to us, even as individuals as teachers or as students. I would like to draw on the wisdom of the late writer George Bernard Shaw who very succinctly crystallizes one of the philosophies of life as this. Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Many times as we grow older we become I'm sure you will also experience this sometimes I experience this myself we become very stoic we become difficult to change you are very set in our ways change although we there's a cliche saying that change is the only thing constant and we never sort of internalize this idea of change as being internalized and internalized in ourselves but we say oh change is the only thing constant and we see it as change outside of ourselves change that is external to us right but when we talk about change when we talk about change it also it also means that we as people must always be open to change and as we grow older I even have to realize as I've mentioned what I want from life and what life gives to you sometimes you feel unfair right so I'll get to that for me this quote rings particularly true as someone who struggled for some time to truly understand and realize what I want from life and balancing it with what life expected from me and what life gave to me it is ultimately our circumstances our context our background our affiliations that will give you the choice to decide what works for you and what works for the people around you even today as I stand before you I'm not sure if this being in academics is the one great narrative of my life or if this is something that I will be doing till my last breath or if this is or I might wish to circumvent into something different area and maybe do something like writing let's say for a lot of my generation basically the graduating class of 2007-2008 when we have the set mindset that having a traditional secure government job was the length and breadth of our ambitions at least for most of us and why because basically when you bring it down to the ground level it provided us what every human being desires in anything in a relationship in a finance in a friendship what do you most desire security right so that is something that especially in my generation we really create for it but the fact is we all of us cannot simply rely on the government to provide all of jobs for all of us right I have seen many friends brilliant intelligent friends and other individuals as well spending the most fruitful years of their lives wasting away and waiting on a government job well meanwhile not doing anything else and that I think is an error I'll tell you why because when you are just fixated on of course I'm not saying that you should not be focused on your exams if you're planning to go for exams yes there has to be a degree of focus but also you should after a certain maybe after a certain time point of time you once you get involved in other activities as well you're exposing yourselves to understanding the integrity of human relationships to work ethics trust me work ethic is not something that is naturally occurring to many of us and it is the combination and it's the product of years and years of mental training and you know what happens is that when you are fixated only on one thing especially in the years of your youth you lose out on so many capacity and character personality building experiences I say this because as I've mentioned five minutes back as we grow older we become more stoic we become much more difficult to change and difficult to adapt to the things around us but as I mentioned again this does not mean you should not pursue this please do but always be mindful of yourself no matter what keep a plan B and work on it concurrently side by side and you will see that along the way along the way you will see that your CV will carry more weight than someone who has only pursued one thing at one time for a prolonged period of time psychologists I think call this the sunk cost fallacy a mind space we get stuck in when we feel that we have invested too much time energy and resources to give up so we find ourselves in a kind of loop right and along the way we miss out on so much that could have been honestly I can assure you that there are no shortcuts that will take us to our destination besides hard work and perseverance at the same time I also want to add that there is no one set track that will assure contentment contentment to each and every one of us because each of us are wired different from each other we have to customize the trajectories of our lives in accordance with our personal context our struggles our backgrounds our educational realities as well as taking into cognitions something that most of us forget to do our own limitations this is also another reason why I feel being too competitive can sometimes dehumanize us competition to a healthy degree is fine and as you enter into a workplace you will find and you will meet all different kinds of people you will meet the efficient and the adapt some who are there for the experience some who are there out of choice and some for the lack of it some you will get along with and some you will avoid and there will also be some with these crabs in a bucket syndrome which is the idea of so kanji and this is the reality of the human conditions there are all types of people around us but remember that everyone, all of us are just trying to get by and make the most of it in such situations once you enter the workplace it is important for us to just be kind and learn to be happy for each other this is something very very important and I truly believe that once you learn to be happy for someone else you are the one who gets blessed and also know how to comfort one another because as I have mentioned, life is not fair I spent most of my education I did most of my education outside Nagaland I did my schooling in Bangalore then I studied my degree in the house in Delhi University and then I went for my higher studies in Hyderabad and now that I am in Nagaland I see certain glaring differences not only in teaching styles but very importantly in the nature of studentship and the nature of scholarship in Nagaland so I feel that most of us, if you become teachers later on and I am sure most of the teachers in this room will agree with me listen when we are teaching somebody we are if we want our society to get better we have to teach our younger ones not what to think but how to think that is the foundation on which critical thinking is built that is something that I have learned over the years because knowledge and information is available anywhere you open YouTube you just type post-modernism it is available I am sure you must have done that I have done it myself if I want to do some refresher quick 5 minutes refresher before going to class open YouTube and then I just tell you these are the concepts but beyond the concepts how to understand them how to internalize these concepts and how to use it in personality development is something that is where the role of teachers come in and you as prospective scholars, teachers leaders of our community should know another thing that I want to tell you is that thinking deeply and dwelling on things when I am talking about critical thinking thinking deeply and dwelling on things is also equally very important this is not the same as overthinking there we have a tendency to sometimes overthink without thinking deeply once you learn to think deeply you start developing layers to your personality in Anglen one of the things that I have noticed is that in the classroom as well in public spaces we do not have a culture of asking questions teachers would agree with me here and I thought for a long time why is this happening why does nobody is nobody listening to me in the classroom or am I just really boring everyone switched off so you start thinking why is nobody asking questions so you start interacting in seminars and workshops still no questions so I am just I have gotten so used to it but we do not have a culture of thinking sorry thinking culture of asking questions perhaps I was thinking perhaps where this comes from and forgive me if I am wrong but I think it stems from our general notion of respect to authority and elders we as a society tend to subconsciously view them as embodiments of perfection but we have to realize that they are also fallible that they are also prone to mistakes and most importantly they are also just like us and that we are all like each other asking the right questions not simply asking questions in order to be disruptive but also interrogating and providing critique is a duty as a duty is a duty to ensure justice and equality in any society so ask the right questions at the right time without being disruptive at the beginning of my career after my post-graduation most of my friends we started thinking about what we were going to do we were pretty much in the same place as you and we had seniors like Hewasa and they started working I think Hewasa started working in a magazine and we had friends who started working in Google, Facebook and they started working in these places that had amazing facilities which I never even imagined would be available in the workspace but at one point of time I was thinking should I just apply to Google but I wanted to pursue writing and I did not want to pursue academics academics admittedly is my second choice I first wanted to be a journalist and a feature writer academics was my backup plan and print journalism was my first priority I you know I was like you, I was young and I found the world of journalism exciting because I felt that it impacted real lives on the ground and thought that academics was far too heavy on theory and I was a writer detached from the realities of the world and you know and I thought that the real world issues took backstage and that was the mindset I carried with me into my first profession so I was working as a correspondent for Times of India and I was going here and there doing my work and however I realized that I was not physically capable of being a journalist because being a journalist entailed being on the ground physically all the time you have to chase reports you have to come back to the office you have to write the reports you have to give it to your editor the editor will give it and then you have to wait till the paper goes in and this is the repeated and this is on loop every single day at work so I realized that I was not physically cut out I started getting sick and sicker so when I cleared my net I decided let's just give this second choice short and you know when I entered academia I was also entering it in a way with all my misconceptions about academics myself and also because I was young and in some parts I thought that academia is a bit pretentious I thought it did not have the kind of tangibility that journalism has so I went with this attitude to academics and I did my own film in war literature or World War II literature and as I was doing this I started noticing I was writing I wrote my thesis on it at the same time that I was working but then I realized that there was a kind of emptiness in me I felt detached from the subject that I was working on because it felt like I made a mistake and back then in 2009-2010 we were not much aware about the study of cultural traditions a study of you know that these studies could also be done under the ambit of English studies or cultural studies so only once I got into PhD and started engaging with professors from the minority communities from the indigenous communities that I realized the fault in my thinking while academia still is and I admit it is still a bit isolated from the real world once you start asking the right questions that stem from the community or that stem from the ground and society you will realize that there is much more that you can do with it I am reminded of what my mentor Dali Kikon once told me she said and I hope that you will carry this with you she said we have to stop looking at the world in terms of hierarchy in terms of oh he is so and so she is so and so if you want a society to really grow we have to start looking at the world as ideas I think our Naga history of subjugation of being historically, socially and economically backward for so many millennia has made us look at ourselves and our indigenous systems in a very problematic way in the sense that we don't have confidence in our own indigenous systems and that is a win for colonialism take for example poetry poetry now the directorate of school education is on its way to changing the syllabus of their native studies textbooks and there is a drive to indigenous syllabus as much as we can when I use the term poetry right we say oh this is traditional Naga poetry but the concept of poetry is a western construct and we have used it to measure and classify our narrative folk songs or poetry that is there in our indigenous knowledge systems we are using so we are calling it lyrical we are calling it elegy but we forget that our own indigenous systems have their own unique classification systems so take pride in this classification systems so when we look at poetry in our in the Naga context we have actually poems like verses there are some they are not exactly poetry right so don't feel the pressure to adapt so much also to other modes of thinking that you lose your own originality or you lose seeing the authenticness of your own indigenous cultures but view our cultures view your cultures in the light of their own context above all a few gentle reminders to you all be mindful of your words words are repositories of feelings love means so many different things if I just write the word love in the background today right now it means a variety of emotions that you feel you have love for your partner love for your mother love for your clothes love for your shoes love for your pet words have a magical potency to influence and impact the way you think the way you feel and the way you act so people say I used to see this on YouTube there are these manifestation where you look in the mirror and you say you are smart, you are beautiful right so be mindful of your words be mindful in the choice of your words okay don't give vent full vent to your emotions such as anger right because in anger we tend to say things that we usually regret even if we don't regret the whole thing we will regret 70% of it but above all your ambitions your desire for success etc remember kindness and forgiveness go a long way if we and it goes a long way because once you learn to forgive others once you learn to forgive somebody who has done you wrong in the workplace you you do better for yourself right I want to leave you with one anecdote if I give you a piece of cloth today maybe I give you like 15 by 15 inch piece of cloth if I give to everyone today some of you might just be like oh whatever just leave it here okay I can make it into a scrunchie right or some of you might think well I'll just put my hair up with it or somebody might just take it home and just make it into like a small bag or maybe a small going bag or something like that if I just give any one of you a piece of cloth life is like that it's all about what you do what you have at that moment right so I want to leave you with this thank you to Tetsu College for the time and thank you very much for listening to me thank you for the great for the inspiring speech thank you ma'am for sharing with us the wonderful insights and the knowledge I think we have to take a lot from that both the faculties as well as the students ma'am we would be extremely delighted to have you here again in the near future thank you ma'am so much now as we end this event I would like to thank the organizing committee principal our director the faculties of board of departments in political science English the HR department, the IT media the maintenance department and all those who have contributed to meet this event success thank you all so with this I close the ceremony and for the next one we will be having lunch which will be served in the tech square in the boys dining hall