(audience applauding) - Thank you, President Jameson, Provost Jackson, the board, the faculty, scholars, fellow honorees, and friends. And most importantly, thank you and an enormous congratulations to the graduates and their families. Class of 2024, give yourself an applause and don't stop until your
heart is filled with applause. (audience and Siddhartha applauding) I am deeply honored. I'm imagining that you're
applauding in your brains at the same time as I speak. I'm deeply honored and humbled to participate at your commencement. Every graduation marks two transitions: a birth and a death. It would be tempting and easy, of course, to begin with the birth, and
yes, I will come to that. But perhaps surprisingly, allow me to begin with
the latter, with death. By this time, you've probably realized that this is not going to be
a typical commencement speech. But parents and graduates, don't worry, this is not a morbid talk,
but an uplifting one. It's a talk that I hope that
you will remember humbly as you think about your own
birth and your rejuvenation. This talk is titled "Four Offerings: Two Statements and Two Questions." But first, some context. I'm a physician, a physician
scientist, and an oncologist. I see cancer patients
and my goal is to treat and sometimes cure the
deadliest of diseases. And despite having a higher
degree in overeducation, as the provost pointed out, I fail. I fail often. There's a common trope written
into the conventional ethos of medicine that the
patient fails the treatment. But for me, the trope is
almost always reversed. I fail the patient. What happens at that moment? Here we arrive at the most
profound of transitions, and we arrive at a
moment that is elemental, ancient, and universal, a
moment that we have encountered since the very birth of our species. I have to state the obvious. I've not experienced it myself,
but I've borne witness to it more than 1,000 times. A seven-year-old girl with
advanced leukemia died in a clinical trial last month. Her heart fluttering
at 300 beats per minute in her last few seconds as she
clutched her mother's hand. A young English professor
with ovarian cancer who was denied her dream
to finish her last book. An elderly man with prostate cancer who had just welcomed a grandchild. In the days before these patients
and many others like them have died, I've asked
them if there were things that they would've wanted to do or say in anticipation of that final moment. And of course, the answers
have been broad and diverse. Some have wanted to climb mountains, some to read a poem, "I heard a Fly buzz." Some have wanted to rage against fate. Some have wanted peace and sanctity. But over time, over time, I began to see a pattern, a
universality, a convergence. Abstracted, simplified, denuded,
stripped of particulars, every person that I've met
at this moment of transition wanted to make four offerings, two statements and two questions: "I want to tell you that I love you. I want to tell you that I forgive you. Would you tell me that you love me? Would you give me your forgiveness?" Four offerings. Offerings so important and profound that I must force myself, even as I speak to the most attentive and
sympathetic of audiences, to repeat them. "I want to tell you that I love you. I want to tell you that I forgive you. Would you tell me that you love me? Would you give me your forgiveness?" Love and forgiveness,
death and transition. But what, you may ask
now, does any of this have to do with graduation? Perhaps you're thinking, "Oh god, he's brought the
wrong papers to the speech. This was the one he
wrote for the funeral." (audience laughing) But no, since we've
already broken the rules of a commencement speech, let's
continue to break some more. I want you to perform an exercise. Some of you are sitting next to friends, some with parents, some are
together, some are dispersed. Please do this for me. Close your eyes if you'd like. Turn to someone that matters in your life. Turn mentally, turn
physically, and say to them, "I want to tell you that I love you. I wanna tell you that I forgive you. Would you tell me that you love me? Would you grant me your forgiveness?" (audience speaking) Do this afternoon, if you wish to, do it as you walk out of this stadium, or do it when you're at home, packing your suitcases for the new life that is waiting for you
in New York or Toledo or Accra or New Delhi. But do it now at this
moment of transition. Don't wait. For the moment that you're
inhabiting, experiencing, encountering also marks a
transition, a birth and a death. And here's the crux. This is the lesson that
we can learn from dying that we can also apply
to life and to living. Waiting merely delays the inevitable. Do it, perhaps, when you cross the door or as you depart for the airport with your overstuffed suitcases, just as you will do it when
you await the final crossing, when there's nothing to carry and only a lonely boat to help you cross. And now we move to the
other transition: birth. I told you these were four offerings, but I could've also described
them as four responsibilities. You have just completed one of the most mind-broadening
educations on the planet at the University of Pennsylvania. I want to offer you
profound congratulations on this transition, but
I also want to offer you one personal experience
that has guided my own life. I'm the child of a refugee. I'm the child of a refugee. In 1946, a few weeks before
the partition of India, a transition so gory and blood-stained that it defies words and memory, my grandmother, a young widow then, left what is now Bangladesh with five boys and a steel suitcase. She arrived in Calcutta, a
nervous, back-broken city on the edge of riots, a city already inflamed,
overburdened, ravaged, and spent. She set up a home in a one-room tenement. The five children inhabited
one room and she slept in the makeshift kitchen. Scarcity was their only abundance, and there was only one luxury: education. There was no money for food, so there would be money for books. At night, each of the boys got
half a piece of white paper and a shared pencil to finish homework. I might note in passing that
over the last five years, I've written three papers
that have formed the core for the discovery of
three new cancer drugs. In each case, the essential
idea was scribbled with a pencil on half
a sheet of white paper. (audience applauding) Years later when my
grandmother came to live with us in Delhi, the steel
suitcase that had been ferried across so many cities came with her. But it remained in the back
of her closet sealed shut. No one knew what it contained. No one knew. She would parry questions about it, and it was slowly forgotten. So when she died, we opened the suitcase. And of course, there were
some predictable objects, mementos of ardor,
memory, and desperation, grabbed and packed in the last minute before a terrifying crossing. Some jewelry, a portrait,
letters, an old white shawl pockmarked by moths. But in the midst of all
this, wrapped in cloth, were four school books. Books? Books? Who drags books across a deadly border and across multiple cities? Some years before she had died, I had asked her what I was
to do with the contents of the steel suitcase, and
she had said mysteriously, "Give them back." But the content was so outdated that there was no giving back. It left me mystified. Who would care about a math
textbook from the 1940s? In 1986 when I was 16, I walked into the library
at Berkeley University. There were shelves upon shelves of books: Einstein, Newton, Rumi,
the lives of a cell, Frantz Fanon, Baldwin, Dickinson, Monroe. In looking longingly at
those overstuffed shelves, from which knowledge might,
perhaps, just slosh out, or truth might slosh
out like golden liquid if I just gave the rack a small jolt, I decided that I too
would make a transition. I would also pick up a
suitcase and migrate, seeking a new life, new
truths, new knowledge, and new books. It would be unseemly
and, frankly, desecrating to make any comparison between
my grandmother's migration and mine, but in keeping
with the family tradition, I too underwent a
transition and a rebirth. I came to study abroad,
crossing many borders, and living in many cities. But it was only after I
had finished medical school in my late 20s that I returned
to my grandmother's request: "Give them back." Stupid, stupid me. It wasn't the books, stupid,
with their outdated equations and old-school writing. It was the responsibility
that comes with transitions and with rebirth. And it was, perhaps, a
reformulation of the four offerings. I want to understand how to return love. I want to forgive. I want you to return my love. I want to understand how
to accept forgiveness. And that's what comes with
your rebirth as graduates. Please, please take this seriously. Believe me, I cannot ignore the tumult of the world around us. You're entering a world
where love and forgiveness have become meaningless,
outdated platitudes, like old textbooks. They're words people
have learned to laugh at. Perhaps you are laughing at them too. But I dare you to use these
words meaningfully again. Use them, but not as empty cliches, imbue them with real meaning. Do it your way, whatever your way is, but do it with the real conviction that you are returning love
and returning forgiveness at this moment of
transition and of rebirth. And of the horrifying,
numbing despair around you, dare, dare to return love and forgiveness to an unforgiving and unforgiven world. (audience applauding) I'm almost done. It doesn't escape me
that I titled my speech "The Four Offerings." That word offering, it is operative here, for it implies not just
an acceptance at death but a giving at birth. Do both and do both of them
with the utmost conviction. I wish you the best. And here's my last offering. Please, please, in this
season of all seasons, especially in these times, and as we end with offering and giving, please don't forget to vote. Thank you. (audience applauding)
