Five youths sharing a flat and society:from Chetan Bhagat speech

Chetan Bhagat’s speech at Gujarat University Convention centre in Ahmedabad was short, and was not longer than 10 minutes. While Modi and Gujarat part of his speech has been presented in another post, this post is about motivational part of his speech. An example of five youths sharing a flat was instant hit in the auditorium. Here are some quotes in near-perfect verbatim from Chetan Bhagat’s speech.

“Five youths doing job somewhere and sharing a flat, obey a general rule that they will not steal anything belonging to other guy. Suppose if five boys living in one flat start telling each other that ‘I will still your purse, or operate your computer,’ it will just not work. Now we need to make this rule effective from five, to ten to 120. This rule will have to form for entire society. If something results into good of us and good for society as well, it’s good. If something is good for us only, it’s also workable, but something that’s fine for us but not for society is just not acceptable. It will harm the whole system. And exactly this is happening in this country. Series of scams in last one year suggests so.”

“We had two major events in recent past. One was that we won the world cup, and not only that we won the world cup, but we also saw how good we felt by winning it, and how young people were on the streets. We felt so happy because normally in India people go up through their connections and , but to win the worldcup one has to play well in the ground, one wins only through excellence, and people smelled India’s excellence in world cup victory, therefore they enjoyed it much. Going up through the connections and background can be a conventional way, but Dhoni didn’t only win world cup but he taught us to win.”

“Another important affair was that of Shri Anna Hazare. Here the important thing was an unprecedented speed. This was a matter of just four days and this event completely change the things. The government agreed to Anna, but only because of the youths who came out in the streets, and suppose if government had waited for Friday or till the week-end, the crowd could be five times bigger, ten times bigger. Who knows what could have been? The government realized that there’s something called Youth power.”

“Power itself is not good, you can do good you can do bad with power. A simple knife can be useful for good when you cut vegetable or fruits, but if used wit bad intention, it can be used for murder. Power itself is not the problem. If you use it well it is good.”

“Good values are: (1)excellence and (2)entrepreneurship. Excellence is not in reading books and getting good number. Till the time you don’t convert excellence into entrepreneurship, it doesn’t serve purpose.”

“One simple rule is to have belief that ‘I will become a good person’. It is better to become a good person than a good businessman. It is important that good persons become successful.”