The annual convocation of Techno India University held on August 12 at the Biswa Bangla Convention Centre was a star-studded affair. While former President Ram Nath Kovind was the chief guest, a plethora of well-known names from different fields, from Shabana Azmi to Shankar Mahadevan to Leander Paes, were in attendance as recipients of honorary D.Litt degrees.
Leander Paes gets an honorary D.Litt from Techno India University. Sudeshna Banerjee
It was a gathering of over 3,000 students as two batches were getting their degrees together, the 2024 batch and the 2023 batch, of which the results had come out 11 months earlier.
If Megha Dhar of Baguiati got the gold medal for the five-year integrated BBA-MBA financial services for 2023, Rajarhat girl Aafreen Parveen got it for 2024. “When the message came in our batch WhatsApp group 15 days before the event about who the chief guest would be, we were so excited,” Megha said. “Getting the degree from a former President is definitely worth the wait,” said Smriti Roy, a 2023 pass-out whose Ph.D is on diaspora literature. Agreed Karunamoyee resident Bishwajit Mondal, who had topped MCA in 2023. “It is a proud moment for us,” felt Swagatalaxmi Banerjee, who received the Srilekha Raha Memorial gold medal, instituted in memory of the late wife of the university’s emeritus professor Atanu Raha, who taught them environmental studies. The girls were among 22 Ph.D recipients and 60 gold medallists who went up on stage, other than postgraduates and graduates.
D.Litt recipients Partha Pratim Chakrabarti of IIT Kharagpur, Shankar Mahadevan, Dr Kunal Sarkar and Shabana Azmi at the Techno India convocation at Biswa Bangla convention centre. Sudeshna Banerjee
Kovind urged the students to embrace change while cultivating timeless skills like critical thinking, self management and emotional intelligence which, he said, would be of use in navigating through life. “Some say we are in the middle of the fourth Industrial Revolution and traditional career paths may be losing relevance. But history tells us newer opportunities arise whenever technological changes transform society,” he pointed out.
Quoting a 2022 study published recently in The Lancet, a journal on global health, the former President pointed out that almost half of India’s adults were not getting sufficient exercise in their daily routine. He prescribed yoga as the solution. He recounted a Cuba trip during which he learnt that the Cuban President was a regular yoga practitioner so he arranged to send a trainer teacher to Cuba within two weeks of his return.
Eleven distinguished people were awarded D.Litt degrees. For Achyuta Samanta, the founder of Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), it was his 59th D.Litt. Paes, after whom the tennis arena at KIIT has been named, was effusive in his praise of Samanta for building world-class sports infrastructure at the institute. “Fifteen students of KIIT took part in the Paris Olympics,” he announced, urging the audience to applaud for Samanta for creating facilities for hockey, cricket and football as well as running tracks. “That is why so many of our athletes come from KIIT,” said the tennis legend, who has recently been inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. He also asked students to maximize their output by making the best of 24 hours every day.
When Mahadevan took the mic, Azmi voiced the popular sentiment by asking him to sing. The singer obliged by presenting some lines from the film Lakshya that were penned by Azmi’s husband, the lyricist Javed Akhtar. He dedicated the song, Haan yeh rasta hai tera, to the students though not many were present in the auditorium, having taken the lunch break then.
Azmi recalled growing up in an atmosphere where her parents believed that arts should be used as an instrument of social change. “I have tried to do that through the roles I have chosen. To appreciate arts, a fertile ground is needed for training. Academic excellence, it has been said on this stage, is very important but how you fare as an individual is equally so.” Mahadevan, she pointed out, is a qualified engineer. “But I am glad that he has chosen to be a singer.”
She went on to mention how AI has changed the world, especially the art world. “Today the choices the young generation is making are fluid. To use AI, we need a different kind of training for artistes, sportspersons and people of literature.”
The other honorary D.Litt recipients included Partha Pratim Chakrabarti of IIT Kharagpur from the fraternity of engineering and science, Dr. Kunal Sarkar from medical science, Dr Kali Pradip Chaudhuri, who built the first private medical college in Bengal, from medical education and Jogen Chowdhury from visual arts.
