A speech for a graduating class

Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.

I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.
The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.
For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.
Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.
For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-and-a-half million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.
It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said,

"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."


That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.


I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.


You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least one of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.
With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.


I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.

Bill Watterson

Yeah, yeah still on the farewell thread. After all, it's la saveur de la saison pour nous!

Below Average...again?

Hopping across a few blogs, I discovered something known as an untelligence test. I'm making no further comments.

61% Untelligent!
Your score is close to the current worldwide average of 64%


The subject shows an astounding level of intelligence, and his sense of observation is one of his best qualities. Considering this, he shows a lot of potential, but that's only part of the equation.

Also, as much as we hate violence, an occasional mauling is one way to solve day-to-day problems like unpleasant coworkers or pesky door-to-door salesmen. He just isn't tough enough, sir, and avoids any situation that involves violence.

Finally, the subject displayed a pathetic and useless (seriously bad) sense of humor, a nearly satanic lack of morality, and a complete lack of self-confidence. The balance of these three traits is important; high levels of confidence, medium levels of morality, and a good level of humor make for the strongest individuals.

Se7en

All thanks to Sameer's and Vivek's tags, here follows one of the most boring posts that I've ever written (at least for me)

Not in any particular order...

I. Before I die, I wanna...
1) be the next Hugh Hefner
2) direct/write/create an epic work
3) tour the world (that'll take more than a lifetime of travel though)
4) walk on another planet (kk even the moon will do)
5) create milestones in the timeline of my chosen profession
6) choose a profession (passion) I can create milestones in
7) [cheesy] make a difference [/cheesy]

NB I'll consider myself lucky to be able to achieve any one of the above (except #6 probably)

To reality now,

II. I can...
1) Waste valuable resources (time, money, water,...)
2) Sleep (Rip van Winkle was just a wannabe)
3) Fuck people's minds (if they are not too demented)
4) be Cynical/Critical with a Capital C
5) Play almost any e-Sport (or atleast learn fast)
6) think too many things too fast, too regularly (all of them utterly useless)
7) orkut/blog

When I don't get to do the above,

III. I say...
1) Yeh kya hai?!?!
2) Wtf
3) Kya bak hai
4) duh
5) pagal hai kya?!!
6) Whoa!!
7) Tattttiiii

Yes I'm perpetually disgusted or stupefied. Now there are very few things that I can do and which are not listed here. But to fulfill the useless requirements of a Tag...

IV. I can't...
1) flirt
2) appreciate purely out of courtesy
3) play chess
4) solve combinatorial puzzles (read problems)
5) talk with a straight face to pretty girls
6) be optimistic for too long
7) writ3 in l337 for the rest of my life

Now to more interesting matters...

V. Things that attract me to girls, besides the usual stuff :)
1) intelligence/knowledge
2) sense of humor
3) beautiful eyes
4) cute smile with dimples
5) attitude (all encompassing word huh?)
6) long hair
7) ability to laugh at my jokes :D

I stopped having crushes on celebrities when i was 17. But for completeness' sake here they are,

VI. Celebrity crushes (oh, besides porn stars!...)
1) Janki Shah (remember Yeh lo, yeh lo (continue echo)
2) Payal Rohatgi
3) Bindu
4) Rakhee Sawant
5) Lalita Pawar
6) Himani Shivpuri
7) Anara Gupta

Now for my (evil grin) prey...

VII. The Tagged... (not many left)
1) Arpit Dhariwal (The blogging world needs your moronic gibberish)
2) Varun Jain
3) Boblichki
4) Maddy
5) Sarat
6) VK
7) Akshat

RIP. Amen.

A Brief Aside...

Taking a break from the sticky mush that nostalgia brings...For those who believe coding to be the most despicable and downright inhuman of jobs, work for the truly unimaginative, creatively challenged etc., check this out. The primary component of all those works of art is...code.

Go go digital Da Vincis!

The Beginning of the End: Premiere Step

I woke up again to the monotonous, mind-numbing beats from Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam. What an army of bouncing jhingurs, assorted creepy-crawlies (probably halfway to Dr. Moreau's), Tropic of Cancer summer heat, drying water tanks, and last but not the least, attendance/pop quizzes could not achieve, was accomplished with gay abandon by those god-forsaken songs. They managed to wake most of my block at Sector-7, Gandhinagar up (of course some determined heroes fought on), to an afternoon of mild regret, no food and playing cards.

Yes this was what most "mornings" in Sector 7 were like. But somehow this one seemed different. It felt eerily like the one Wyndham describes in The Day of the Triffids. My roommate wasn't in his bed, which was never a good sign. All the other single-room flats in my block were locked, which was definitely a bad sign. And the song had stopped on cue as if it had just been played to trouble my peaceful slumber. Then realization dawned (like it dawns when you screw up your whole life and only realize it on your deathbed). The last night, my blockmates had been studying, running around with question/answers, all tense and sweaty foreheads, struggling in their debut with textbooks, and I?...Unable to cope so much sudden pressure, I reverted to my inherent defense mechanism, which comes in handy in such stressful, high pressure situations: I went off to sleep. And now, apparently, this mechanism had produced some unwanted consequences. Slowly, the terror of having missed my first ever BEC exam began dawning on me. How could not anybody wake me? How could they be so mean and uncaring? When this anger, frustration and sheer terror achieved a sort of unholy crescendo reaching nightmarish proportions, only then did I care to snap out of it (There's a limit to the level of nightmares that one can take just before an exam, however irrelevant). Dawn was breaking. I had about a couple of hours to study how voltages don't follow human laws, and in fact basically just happen to hang around useless conductors. Too much pressure. I'm in my first year of college for chrissakes! Someone will come to wake me in time.

Welcome to Block 82, Sector-7, Virgin Territory. Tucked away in one not very noticeable corner of Govt Housing, we revelled in our anonymity. We shared our borders with our gregarious neighbours, the good people of block-83 and with the road which led to lots of places, but rarely ours. In fact it was so low-profile that the folk from Save-Water-Or-Else Tankers Inc. frequently skipped this block, much to our toilet's discomfiture (we? we were a little hygienically challenged. Out of sight, out of mind, pinch your nose, or shit you'll find).

Ah, the fragile innocence of youth! The time when Cupid's workings stir young blood as heatedly as might Hell's raging conflagrations. The time when the brain accepts its inferiority graciously, to make way for torrents of passion, which flood your very being. The time when your whole world seems to hinge on that one glance that hitches (generally the second one), and that one impossible smile of acknowledgement. The time when...yeah well, it almost lasted a week. I don't know how I got it, or how exactly I was cured, but the ailness was short-lived. And of course, my new acquintances (and future friends), made merry, mostly out of my misery. (Life after that one week has mostly been payback, muahahaha). But all and all, it was fun while it lasted. For a spicy, sexed up, account of what actually transpired,...well ask anybody! Who the heck am I to come in the way of your entertainment? Although yours truly was cured of this contagious infection, the germ had spread, in some cases, with gratuitous ego-fatalities (Yes, yes there are many stories to tell, but pal, you gotta be invited!)

A story that almost everyone is party to is about our first and final (from this side) tryst with the peculiar phenomenon of ragging. Now before I'd walked the hallowed grounds of this college, I'd heard a lot about suicides, expulsions, and career coup de grace(s) resulting from this particular process, which had ruined sometimes more than just careers. But when I came here, it seemed the only way you could be driven to suicidal inclinations was through the sheer desolation of the place! Vast expanses of green disturbed only occasionally by workers tearing down more than constructing. Our erstwhile seniors did try to make their presence felt through inane efforts (Jhinga la la hoor hoor anyone?) like taking innocuous intros and making poeple run around proposing to their crushes with whom they never had the guts to talk in person (man, I was so against ragging then). What they seemed most interested in of course, were the ladies in our batch (this interest saved me from an intro. Btw, I hope you remember what happened when a senior mistook a particular female in our batch for a waitress). So there we were, treading merrily upon what the senior's thought of as their own territory, and not paying due respect to the landlords/dukes/feudal tribe-leaders/you-get-the-drift. Drastic action was in order. So a handful of people made famous as the Patwari gang took it upon themselves to restore the dignity of their caste. About seven people (including yours truly), were loitering down the road to Gh-0, when we were ordered aside for a dose of personality development. Now these people looked a lot more different than the ones encountered on campus. In fact, they seemed a different species altogether. Different enough, that I felt a tinge of fear tickling my spine for the first time after coming here. We were made to kneel (which nearly decimated our haunches), and one by one, we were ordered to pay obeisance to our lord and masters (speaking in context of course), and speak eloquently (helped by a note) on why a particular aperture adorning our backside was theirs for the taking, whenever and wherever they wanted it. Needless to say, (and hence I'll say it) it was garnished with a lavish dosage of language any sailor would admire. Hence some people took to it like an ICTian takes to Copy/Paste, while other more conservative types had trouble uttering two syllables in a row. Now I had taken to copy/pasting before I got here, and hence it was no surprise when I began grinning at the apparent discomfort of the orthodox (or the Hindi illiterate). A particular gentleman adept at stealing petrol, but better at getting caught, decided to interrupt what were supposed to have been fearful moments for me, by shouting at me to rest my haunches on the ground (phew!), and threatening to reserve special treatment for me when everyone else was over and done with. Hmm, that didn't sound encouraging. But all's well when my rear end's well. Now people's attitude toward this treatment varied wildly from outright fear to downright obedience (not out of fear) to polite non-co-operation (to which I'm coming to in a sentence). We had people singing, giving tutorials on masturbation and waste disposal post-masturbation and people enacting dogs and their peculiar toilet habits, the latter wholly an idea of the person concerned. Then we had another category of persons. The senior who threatened me with dire consequences took one of these troublesome types to the head honcho, who in additional to looking frightening, was blessed with a thunderous voice. "Kutta ban!! BHENC**D" went this person. "Nahin sir. Aur kuchh kar lunga". (Some people just never know when to and when not to negotiate). The senior continued in the same vein, including the reluctant rebels' mother, father and probably his whole ancestry in his effort to make a dog out of a man. uh uh, not to be. I began taking personal interest in this already intriguing tete-a-tete, when the senior began talking about how he would come to the person's room and sodomize him and his whole block later on. Why in God's name did this person have to be my roommate! There was little chance that this would dent his determination when the mention of his whole family hadn't. I resigned myself to my fate, which consisted of speaking out aloud, the name of a brand of condoms, and running around in circle riding a scooter made of air. In the end, two seniors decided that quite a few of the "tormented" weren't digesting all this too well and gave a short orientation session on how they were the most benevolent seniors who ever walked the face of this earth (of course he was uttering rubbish! We are!), and what all they could do and didn't. Well, they hadn't counted on what all we could do and did. We all know what happened next, when the Director was treated to the same piece of creative writing that we'd already reviewed. I chose to keep a week of mourning for those poor seniors by beginning to dress according to the dress code which now stood annulled.

Never having acted in my school, I was surprised when I was offered a monster of a role, in a play written by a notable Hindi playwright. The Drama Club (officially it had some weird forgettable name), formed more as an excuse to interact with junior girls than do any drama, had helped me to get this role. My god, I'd never had to mug so much for a History exam! Even after my lines were edited and cut, I still kept forgetting half of 'em. Doing so much work for a non-academic end, I was peeved when in the poster for the play, I was listed a whopping eleventh in a list of eleven dramatis personae. Swallowing what little I had of an ego, I kept rehearsing. On D-Day, while cycling to college in the evening with the costumes in the perfect darkness of the 700m stretch from Gh-0, I happened to collide head-on with my neighbour, who incidentally happened to have the only other cycle of the same model in the whole college (weird irrelevant co-incidences always capture my imagination). My head hurt, but I managed to limp my way (my toe was completely bloodied) to the stage and heroically forget one-fourth of my lines. The high point of the play (despite me having more than half of the lines), didn't have me figuring anywhere, as it involved a senior (the de facto director), a very pretty batchmate, and a pretty senior (doing exactly what I don't remember. But you wouldn't miss it if you'd known, would you?). The crowd of course, didn't notice anything of what I said, so the more lines I forgot, the shorter the misery for was for them. Besides, the next play starred none other than everybody's wet dream, our Economics TA (I just couldn't get to see enough of her! Don't get me wrong. I was like any other male, but my interests in her were strictly academic due to the excessive competition. I just couldn't see enough of her, because I bunked most of her tutorials and slept through the rest).

Now this has become a decent sized post, but golly gee, there's still so much more to tell! I still want to pen down a lot of little anecdotes about the play rehearsals; about how I made my first few friends; of how my identity was virtually usurped by my illustrious namesake; of how we tormented the people living on the ground-floor during the night (the other side of the story is already documented before); of how after filling up a full sheet and a half in the BEC final exam, I managed a whopping one out of fifty (and still got a C); of how I played Midtown/Heretic II in the SPG labs, and only got caught later on when I wasn't even playing; the list is endless. I still have absolutely no idea how I managed not to flunk a single course that semester (despite the fact that I've had worse sems in terms of SPI). To write about any of those things (and more), I guess, would be another story...another post. Fret not, for the Semester of Ultra-Decadence beckons!

To be continued...