'I decided to dedicate my life to spreading goodness' — the TISS convocation address

Convocation speeches are rarely news. This one was. The Indian Eye reported on an address delivered by Ravi Sharma as chief guest at the 84th convocation of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai that had, within days, escaped the auditorium — clipped, reposted and circulated on YouTube by commentators urging their followers to stop what they were doing and watch it.

The report introduces the speaker to a general readership. President of the IIT Alumni Council, a network of more than fifty thousand IITians across the world. Chairman of the Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association of India. A CEO who reached the summit of corporate life and then, at fifty, chose to leave it for a mission he describes as Spreading Goodness — supporting a sustainable society, inclusive education and spirituality.

Educators, not teachers

He opened with gratitude. IIT Roorkee, he told the graduates, had given him something rarer than instruction: he had been fortunate, he said, to have more educators than teachers. The distinction runs through everything that followed. A teacher transfers knowledge; an educator changes what a person believes is possible. The graduates in front of him, he suggested, were about to discover which kind they would become for the people who depended on them.

Why fifty

The most-quoted stretch of the address concerned his own decision to walk away from a global corporate career at the peak. The reasoning was not fatigue and it was not philanthropy in the conventional sense. It was arithmetic. He had realised, he said, that sharing and increasing the fortune of others mattered more than any further increase in his own. His "mantras", as the report calls them, followed from a single observation — that each of us is the product of three things: our definitions, our exposure and our ability to learn. Widen any one of them and the whole life changes. He told the story of moments when the same sum of money, given by different people in different circumstances, had produced utterly different results — because the giving, not the amount, was the variable.

The origin of Mission Chetna

Then the sentence that gave the report its headline. He had decided, he said, to dedicate the rest of his life to spreading goodness — and specifically to a method. Find the people who are already working selflessly for society, often unnoticed and unfunded, and help them grow into organisations. Not so that they become famous, but so that the goodness survives them. Institutions outlive individuals; a good deed institutionalised keeps happening after its author is gone. That intention has since become Mission Chetna, the Institute of Goodness's ecosystem of changemakers and partner NGOs.

The hall interrupted him with applause several times, the report notes, and the applause did not stop at the door. Through social media the address reached an audience many times larger than the graduating class it was written for — which is, in its own way, a demonstration of the speech's thesis.

Watch it

The full address, published by TISS, is the film in the hero of this website and in our Watch & Listen section. The Institute recommends starting at 1:25.