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Speeches of Alagappa Chettiar |
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WELCOME SPEECH OF - - - - - - Friends, I was just telling you that right through my life, it has never been my habit to take things lying down. I have always stood up to my rights, fought for them and pleaded for them. But it has now become the Will of God that I should be confined to bed, lying down for the last eight months and God knows for how many months more. Friends, I am deeply overwhelmed with the elaborate arrangements that you have made and what is more with the great enthusiasm that you have shown, in asking me to be present atleast for a few minutes, just before leaving for Madras. As I first start speaking to you, I must first tender my heartfelt thanks naturally to Providence, but later, immediately after, to the instrument of Providence, that is to my Doctors who have been unremittingly attending on me through day and night, through thick and thin irrespective of and despite the great hardship I have been causing them by making such undue demands on them. I am most grateful to them and I wish to publicly, in the presence of my fellow students, acknowledge the great debt, that I owe to them and the great kindness that i have received from them, and I will continue to receive from them, for the rest of my life. Friends, It was Tennyson who sang, "My strength is the strength of ten, because my heart is pure", i may for a moment make a little amendment even to the great Tennyson's line, and tell you that my happiness, despite my physical pain and unhappiness--my happiness is boundless, limitless, because my happiness does not consist naturally in my own happiness, but my happiness consists in the happiness of the thousands of students young and old, boy and girl that read in our vast educational campus. Friends, it is that thought that has been keeping me alive even during these terrible months, seven or eight months, and during the course of this foul disease to which I have fallen a victim. Friends, I do not propose to talk to you anymore except to tell that any individual credit that you take, or the happiness that comes to any one of you individually or collectively~ I consider it as my own happiness, whether I know you individually or not. I think of this campus as one indivisible unit both of Staff and Students and I take such unmixed happiness from their own happiness and it is THAT, that keeps me alive as I just told you a little earlier. Friends, through you all I wish to convey both to you and also the other students of the campus, naturally who are not here, my sincere good wishes for your personal happiness, not merely during the tenure of the few years that you will be studying in this campus but, what is more, for the rest of your life in the wider amphitheatre, where you will be playing your part later, after you leave the College Campus. 'God bless you' is my sincere prayer and I hope God willing, if it is God's Will, I will come back and see you, or in any event I pray to God that everything be well with you and everyone of you will be alright. Thank you.
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