| First of all I would like to thank Dr Iftikhar Elahi for his kind invitation to be here this afternoon, and to share with you the excitement each one of you in this hall feels on this very special occasion. |
| What is so special about today? After all many of you have won prizes before? [Hands up] |
| What makes this occasion so important in your young lives is that you have become a celebrity. Some of you have topped in the Lahore region. Others have achieved a national recognition. For those who have topped in the World, you are at the highest level. You have gone global – until, that is, the British Council establishes its exam centres in Outer Space. |
| Your respective subjects range across the alphabet - from A for Art & Design and Add Maths, through Biology, Combined Science, Food & Nutrition, Religious Studies, Sociology, to U for Urdu. |
| As High Achievers, I believe you have done two things – you have set standards for your own future performance, and you have set benchmarks for others to follow. |
| There was a time after our country was created when just passing O levels was an achievement. Then, having a number of passes became the measure of excellence. Today, it is not how many O or A levels you have passed, but the quality of your pass. The test of that quality is this Award. |
| I would not blame you if you decided that this was achievement enough. Why bother to work any harder? But that is not the spirit that motivated you, nor what brought you here into this hall. Nor is it the spirit that you will leave behind like a discarded programme when you leave this hall. That spirit of endeavour, the commitment to improve yourself, and the determination to succeed and to excel, will remain with you - in your graduate studies and in that most difficult of post-graduate programmes – Life itself. |
| Your success and presence here today is the consummation of a number of inputs – by your teachers who have enabled you to exceed their own ambitions; to your parents who have helped to make you become the living fruition of their own dreams; to the various boards and institutions who have designed curricula that now challenge students from around the globe; and to the British Council that ensures that you can sit for exams in a fair, impartial and congenial environment, and then acknowledges your success with well-organised functions such as these. |
| I would like to conclude with a story about a young girl. In 1947, she came from across the border with four young siblings. She clutched in her small hand about thirty rupees her parents had given her, and the address of her uncle and aunt in Lahore. That is all she had. She and her younger sister were enrolled in a local school but they were so poor that each day, they took turns to attend class because they had to share the same pair of shoes. That young girl’s name was Ms Gulzar Bano, and she studied, excelled and became the first female Secretary in the Federal Government in the 1980s. |
| My reason for narrating this story to you is to reassure you that education has nothing to do with money or the school you go to or the uniform you can afford. It has to do with you and your mind. |
| You may have seen the film A Beautiful Mind. In it, there is a moving sequence where professors pay tribute to their colleague who has just won the Nobel Prize. They do not give him flowers or boxes of chocolates, or books that they had authored. Each one of them simply paid him homage by placing his own pen on the desk of the Nobel Prize winner. |
| Let me do the same today, and offer you with this token the sincere homage of a person who compliments you on your latest achievements, and sees a future Nobel Prize winner in each one of you. |
