Saturday, February 11, 2012
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
India Mulls Ultramega Plan for Solar Power
India mulls a Mega Plan for Solar Power, called the National Solar Mission, the Indian plan outlines a target for 20,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2020, according to a report leaked out by the Greenpeace, see link below.
National Solar Mission India 2009 Draft
While this plan is an initiative which has been published recently, however India continues in its march towards becoming a no 1 solar power hub of the world after winning the pole position in IT.
To keep pace with the global trend of exercising feed-in-tariff solar power, Govt. of India initiates Solar PV projects up to a maximum capacity of 50 MW are to be supported by financial incentives of a maximum of Rs 12/kWh (28 US cents) for PV projects and Rs 10/kWh (24 US cents) for solar thermal power projects for a period of 10 years. With investors rushing to set up solar power projects and adding up to 2500 MW of capacity, the Ministry has asked the Planning Commission and the Indian Cabinet to expand the 11th Plan solar power programme beyond 50 MW.
Solar PV especially which so far was surviving on the left over chips of the semiconductor industry has now come of age and is perhaps now the fastest growing industry of the world.India already has a thriving semiconductor and chip manufacturing industry and above all a thriving education platform which creates the best enginers of the world, and has thus the capabillity.
India will be very actively represented by the author in the Solar Economic Forum being organized in London on Grid Parity from the 16th to 18th June.
Kindly see Solar Economic Forum London, 16-18th June
National Solar Mission India 2009 Draft
While this plan is an initiative which has been published recently, however India continues in its march towards becoming a no 1 solar power hub of the world after winning the pole position in IT.
To keep pace with the global trend of exercising feed-in-tariff solar power, Govt. of India initiates Solar PV projects up to a maximum capacity of 50 MW are to be supported by financial incentives of a maximum of Rs 12/kWh (28 US cents) for PV projects and Rs 10/kWh (24 US cents) for solar thermal power projects for a period of 10 years. With investors rushing to set up solar power projects and adding up to 2500 MW of capacity, the Ministry has asked the Planning Commission and the Indian Cabinet to expand the 11th Plan solar power programme beyond 50 MW.
Solar PV especially which so far was surviving on the left over chips of the semiconductor industry has now come of age and is perhaps now the fastest growing industry of the world.India already has a thriving semiconductor and chip manufacturing industry and above all a thriving education platform which creates the best enginers of the world, and has thus the capabillity.
India will be very actively represented by the author in the Solar Economic Forum being organized in London on Grid Parity from the 16th to 18th June.
Kindly see Solar Economic Forum London, 16-18th June
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Solar Power Growth and Opportunities in India
The solar energy industry in India has undoubtedly gained momentum and should be able to keep pace with the government’s aim of achieving 10% of the country’s total electricity requirements by 2012. India already possesses a balanced Eco-system for the PV industry, a high-tech manufacturing base and skilled labor sufficient to make it a booming industry. Annual PV production has already reached over 300 MW, with about 85% being exported.India receives solar energy equivalent to over five trillion MWh a year, far more than its total energy consumption, and should therefore benefit from economies of scale that are unavailable to smaller countries. However, it is necessary to address the availability and management of a strong infrastructure and the need to consider a long-term solar energy policy (20–25 years).
India's renewable energy ministry has declared a new program designed to expand solar power generating projects up to a maximum capacity of 50MW.Faced with inadequate power generation and big transmission and distribution losses, the government wants to generate at least 10 percent of its electricity through solar power by 2012. A total of 33 solar photovoltaic power plants connected to the Indian power grid have already been built with government support. The plants are expected to generate 25.5 lakh (2.55 million) units of electricity annually. India currently has 19 manufacturers of solar photovoltaic modules. Several more large investments are in the pipeline.
However, to keep pace with the global trend of exercising feed-in-tariff solar power, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has produced a set of initiatives aimed at bolstering solar generation. Solar PV projects up to a maximum capacity of 50 MW are to be supported by financial incentives of a maximum of Rs 12/kWh (28 US cents) for PV projects and Rs 10/kWh (24 US cents) for solar thermal power projects for a period of 10 years. With investors rushing to set up solar power projects and adding up to 2500 MW of capacity, the Ministry has asked the Planning Commission and the Indian Cabinet to expand the 11th Plan solar power programme beyond 50 MW.
India's renewable energy ministry has declared a new program designed to expand solar power generating projects up to a maximum capacity of 50MW.Faced with inadequate power generation and big transmission and distribution losses, the government wants to generate at least 10 percent of its electricity through solar power by 2012. A total of 33 solar photovoltaic power plants connected to the Indian power grid have already been built with government support. The plants are expected to generate 25.5 lakh (2.55 million) units of electricity annually. India currently has 19 manufacturers of solar photovoltaic modules. Several more large investments are in the pipeline.
However, to keep pace with the global trend of exercising feed-in-tariff solar power, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has produced a set of initiatives aimed at bolstering solar generation. Solar PV projects up to a maximum capacity of 50 MW are to be supported by financial incentives of a maximum of Rs 12/kWh (28 US cents) for PV projects and Rs 10/kWh (24 US cents) for solar thermal power projects for a period of 10 years. With investors rushing to set up solar power projects and adding up to 2500 MW of capacity, the Ministry has asked the Planning Commission and the Indian Cabinet to expand the 11th Plan solar power programme beyond 50 MW.
Change is In the Air for the Customers of Electric Power
Is
Electricity lends itself to futures trading. It meets the three broad criteria needed for successful futures markets: prices are volatile; there is a large, diverse universe of buyers and sellers; and the physical product is fungible. The exchange clearinghouse provides a system of guarantees that mitigates counterparty credit risk.
In
The physical power supply system in
The complexity of electricity spot markets is not conducive to common futures transactions. There are also substantial problems with price transparency, modeling of derivative instruments, effective arbitrage, credit risk, and default risk.
How should the contract be?
Greater market participation is a key issue for the emerging rather "under supplied" Indian power market. In an effort to address this, the Indian exchanges in consultation with regulators have to create a contract that reduces the barriers to market entry by removing the requirement for underlying physical OTC contracts and signatory status.
The Unique Nature of Electricity as a Commodity
Storage and Real-Time Balance
The two most significant characteristics of electricity are that it cannot be easily stored and it flows at the speed of light. As a result, electricity must be produced at virtually the same instant that it is consumed, and electricity transactions must be balanced in real time on an instantaneous spot market. Electricity's real-time market contrasts sharply with the markets for other energy commodities, such as natural gas, oil, and coal, in which the underlying commodity can be stocked and dispensed over time to deal with peaks and troughs in supply and demand.
Real-time balancing requirements also complicate the market settlement process. Some electricity market transactions occur before the system constraints are fully known or the price is calculated. In extreme cases, the settlement price may be readjusted up to several months later.
Electricity is typically "stored" in the form of spare generating capacity and fuel inventories at power stations. For existing plants, the "storage costs" are usually less than or equivalent to the costs of storing other energy fuels; however, the addition of new storage capacity ( i.e., power stations) can be very capital intensive. The high cost of new capacity also means that there are disincentives to building spare power capacity. Instead, existing plants must be available to respond to the strong local, weather-related, and seasonal patterns of electricity demand. Over the course of a year or even a day, electricity demand cycles through peaks and valleys corresponding to changes in heating or air conditioning loads. Two distinct diurnal electricity markets also exist, corresponding to the on-peak and off-peak load periods. Each of these markets has its own volatility characteristics and associated price risks.
Regulatory Challenges Ahead for Electricity Derivatives
Financial Risk to Ratepayers
The financial risks resulting from the use of derivatives are illustrated by the number of companies that have suffered significant losses in derivative markets. Large losses can be the result of well-intentioned hedging activities or of wanton speculation. In either case, regulators must be concerned with the impact that such losses could have on ratepayers who, absent protections, might be placed at financial risk for large losses
Market Power
The preceding paragraphs have illustrated the complexity and non-homogeneity of the electricity markets. Amid this dynamic environment, opportunities abound for market power and gaming strategies to develop.
Controlling this potential threat to competitive markets will require substantial regulatory review, as well as physical changes in the marketplace itself. In many areas of the country, only a small number of suppliers are capable of delivering power to consumers on a particular bus bar, and each of the suppliers can easily anticipate the bids of the others. In such "thin" markets, the price of electricity can be driven by market power rather than by the marginal costs of production. The need for overall market transparency will be critical to traders and to the market monitors.
Conservation and Demand
One of the key tools available to regulators for reducing the volatility of electricity prices is demand-side management programs. Electricity prices are likely to be most volatile during the on-peak hours of the day and substantially more stable (and lower) during the off-peak periods.
This fact, coupled with the hockey stick shaped supply cost curve suggests that substantial reductions in volatility could be achieved through the use of market mechanisms and demand-side management programs to shift consumption to off-peak hours. State and Federal authorities have been examining a variety of possible methods for shifting consumer demand for electricity; however, one of the most direct methods—real-time pricing for large electricity consumers—remains largely untapped.
Ideal features of the contract
Baseload and Peakload contracts should be listed based on the power supply calendar and settlement cycle favoured by the industry with 12 months, 6 quarters and 4 seasons; No requirement to be a power supplier party; Margin offset between Electricity Futures and Natural Gas Futures/Coal Futures/Crude Oil Futures; Each contract will be physically deliverable and will be cleared by one central counterparty, Minimum trading size will be 10 lots; Months, Quarters and Seasons will be listed in parallel – no cascading; All positions will be held as months for maximum flexibility for participants.
There should ideally be 50% margin offsets between Peak and Base Load contracts; Inter-month spreads should be made available and there will be price implication down the curve.
Outright margin rates are envisaged to be about Rs. 136 per MWh for baseload contracts and Rs. 248 per MWh for peakload contracts. Inter-month spread rates are envisaged to be Rs. 180/- per MWh for baseload contracts and Rs. 300 per MWh for peakload contracts; the Contracts will initially be available for trading through existing commodity exchanges and will then be rolled out to ISV solutions.
The exchanges should provide financially settled monthly futures contracts for on-peak and off-peak electricity transactions based on the daily floating price for each peak day of the month at the respective regional hub. For eg The western hub could consist of delivery points, primarily on the BSES /TATA Power transmission systems. Additional risk management and trading opportunities should be offered through options on the monthly futures contract.
The peak daily floating prices should be the weighted exponential average of say the western hub real-time locational marginal pricing for the 16 peak hours of each peak day, provided by the Utility service providers in the western hub. Peak hours should be designated from
Off-peak hours are from
Quality Specification
Electric energy delivered under this contract shall be in the form of three phase current alternating at a nominal frequency as prescribed by the Central Electricity regulatory authority, and be in conformance with the specifications of the CERC.
Transmission
Except as set forth in, seller shall be required to make all transmission arrangements to deliver electric energy to central buyers, and buyer shall be required to make all transmission arrangements to receive electric energy at Central sellers
Alternative Delivery Procedure
Seller or buyer may agree with the buyer or seller with which it has been matched by the Exchange Rules to make and take delivery under terms or conditions which differ from the terms and conditions prescribed by the exchange. In such a case, Clearing Members shall execute an Alternative Delivery Notice on the form prescribed by the Exchange and shall deliver a completed executed copy of such Notice to the Exchange. The delivery of an executed Alternative Delivery Notice to the Exchange shall release the Clearing Members and the Exchange from their respective obligations under the Exchange contracts.
In executing such Notice, Clearing Members shall indemnify the Exchange against any liability, cost or expense it may incur for any reason as a result of the execution, delivery or performance of such contracts or such agreement, or any breach thereof or default thereunder. Upon receipt of an executed Alternative Delivery Notice, the Exchange will return to the Clearing Members all margin monies held for the account of each with respect to the contracts involved.
Conclusion
There is an urgent impending need for a market driven vibrant instrument for electricity futures, which would attract huge market participation automatically.
The electricity futures/options markets may provide useful information about forward prices. Futures prices represent the market participants' forecasts of what future spot prices will be. An essential feature of electricity futures contracts (for delivery at a specific location) is that as the delivery date of the futures contract approaches, the futures contract price and the spot price will converge. While the futures contract prices provide forecasts of forward spot prices, there is no assurance that the forecast will be correct, although the forecast error can be expected to diminish, the shorter the time remaining to futures contract maturity.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Harry Potter at Harvard:J K Rowling's Harvard Graduation ceremony speech
The following is a - A must read
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Harvard University Commencement Address
J.K. Rowling
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all,
graduates, The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement. Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me. Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personalquirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, butpoverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers. I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average
person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default. Failure gave me an inner security that
I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong
will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your
relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any
qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the researchdepartment at Amnesty International' s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and
executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness. And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have.
The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing. But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way
you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Harvard University Commencement Address
J.K. Rowling
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all,
graduates, The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement. Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me. Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personalquirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, butpoverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers. I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average
person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default. Failure gave me an inner security that
I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong
will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your
relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any
qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the researchdepartment at Amnesty International' s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and
executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness. And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have.
The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing. But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way
you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
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