If everyone's problems were like laundry hanging out to dry in an open field and you had the opportunity to go out into that field and exchange your laundry, your problems in other words, with anyone else's, you would still choose your own problems. I'm not the usual suspect class day speaker for sure. I come from another profession, the often undiplomatic world of commerce（商业）. I come from half way around the world, I'm not an alumnus（男校友）. But when I asked Dean（院长） Kite, she said the reasons for which they invited me were in fact all of the above. But I'm not here to try and dispense（分配） any unique wisdom.

  As the proverbial school girl wrote, Socrates was a wise Greek philosopher（哲学家） and he went around dispensing（分配） gratuitous（免费的） advice and they poisoned him. I deeply fear that fate（命运）. So what I will do is to just throw some ideas at you based on my own life experience and my own world that I hope will be relevant to any profession and to every life. Now picture if you will the world in 1946 when my father stood here. The Second World War had just ended. Independence for India was just around the corner as Rachel mentioned.

  The beginning of the end of colonialism was in sight. And details of the full extent of the death and the destruction and the horrors of the Holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were just emerging. The problems of peace were every bit as convoluted（旋绕的） as the problems of war. And to my father in 1946 the world must have looked hopeful（有希望的） but immensely（非常） complicated. And yet I wonder what my father would say about the world as we see it today. We are wrestling with climate change, pandemics, terrorism, energy crises, social inequities to name just a few.

  And because of their trans-border impact these issues too now fall within the ambit of diplomacy of international affairs, of international law. And what would my father have made of the impact of technology? In many cowboy movies the appearance of the hero or villain is often preceded by his shadow. We now have a new cowboy in town, heralded（通报） by a lengthening shadow, the shadow of the metaverse. Entrepreneurs are buying up real estate on it. Countries are opening up virtual embassies（ 大使馆） in it.

  And through the metaverse we can live not just a virtual second life but also a parallel life where the virtual intersects（相交） with reality and the boundaries（分界线） between the two grow more and more blurred. Now in many ways it may actually enhance the effectiveness（ 效果） of diplomacy. Virtual face-to-face negotiations may become as effective as in-person ones. Global summits（最高点） and indeed side conversations where you can interact virtually, where you can smell the coffee almost can lead to both quicker responses and actually make a dent in climate change. On the other hand, the metaverse is likely to turn out to be the new Wild West. What laws will govern it?

  Who will have jurisdiction（司法权） and over what? Who will own the new forms of data that the metaverse is going to generate? Pupil dilation, heartbeat（心跳） rates, biometric data, what happens to free speech and to privacy? The metaverse and indeed the technology-driven world of the future is going to be like the force from Star Wars of course. But as all of you know, by itself the force is neither good nor bad. It depends on who uses it and towards what end.

  So these are all the portentous issues that your generation will have to grapple（抓住） with. But yours is not the usual graduating class. You have all experienced the disruption（ 动乱） caused by COVID. You witnessed the absurdity of a brutal（残忍的） war taking place in the 21st century between African nations. You're seeing a world where few leaders are true or permanent role models. And in such a situation, where there seems to be no certainty but only shades of grey, how does it make sense for me to tell you to go out into the world holding fast to your ideals?

  But my answer to that would be a resounding（ 回响） yes. Because it may in fact be the only way to make sense of a world in which the ground under your feet feels like quicksand（[水利] 流沙）. And because all of you are in a unique position to apply those ideals to your work right away, because you've all taken a decision to follow a career path that is going to have a wider impact on global issues than almost any other career. So my first exhortation to you would be to embrace the ought, not the is. Shape the world as it ought to be, rather than accepting it as it is.