JUNE 8, 2020
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a message to graduates said “in bleak moments like these, it can be difficult to find hop. So let me skip right to the end and tell you what happens: You will prevail.”
The event streamed live was attended by former US president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, including singer Lady Ganga, Beyonce, and South Korean band BTS.
Pichai who studied in India’s IIT used earlier cataclysmic events to explain to graduates that they could surmount the hurdles asserting that the “class of 1920 also graduated during a deadly pandemic, the class of 1970 graduated in the midst of the Vietnam War, and the class of 2001 graduated months before 9/11.”
“The long arc of history tells us we have every reason to be hopeful,” the Google CEO told graduates while advising students not to lose patience.
Recounting his own difficulties, Pichai told graduates: “My father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane…America was expensive. A phone call back home was more than $2 a minute, and a backpack cost the same as my dad’s monthly salary in India.”
“I grew up without much access to technology. We didn’t get our first telephone till I was ten. I didn’t have regular access to a computer until I came to America for graduate school. And, our television, when we finally got one, only had one channel.”
Courtesy/Source: WION
