By Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged IIT Delhi’s graduating students to carry one habit with them into professional life: keep asking questions. Addressing the institute’s convocation on Saturday, Modi said curiosity and the willingness to challenge accepted ideas would be more valuable in the real world than simply knowing how to find the right answers.
The Prime Minister’s message focused on the sharp difference between academic life and the challenges graduates will face outside the campus. Drawing on the experience of IIT alumni, he said many successful innovators made their mark not by answering questions better than others, but by identifying problems that people had stopped questioning.
‘Life has no fixed syllabus’
Modi told the graduates that unlike an IIT examination, life comes without a defined syllabus or question paper. While students know what subjects to study, assignments to complete and examinations to prepare for, professional and personal life often offers no such clarity.
“In the exam of life, everything is out of syllabus,” Modi said, explaining that graduates will frequently have to identify the problem themselves before they can begin looking for an answer.
He encouraged the students to remain intellectually alert and resist accepting established practices simply because they have existed for a long time.
According to Modi, curiosity should not end with asking questions. Graduates should also have the confidence to pursue solutions and turn their questions into meaningful work.
Lessons from IIT alumni
Reflecting on the journeys of IIT graduates he has followed over the years, Modi said many of them succeeded because they looked at familiar problems differently.
He said some alumni identified questions that society had stopped treating as questions and found solutions to problems that others had accepted as unavoidable. For the new graduates, he presented this ability to challenge assumptions as a potential source of innovation and individual identity.
His advice was particularly relevant to students entering a rapidly changing world of technology, startups and artificial intelligence, where conventional approaches can quickly become outdated.
Don’t turn life into a competition
Modi also asked the graduates to resist the pressure to measure their progress against their peers. Salaries, campus placements, startup valuations and professional milestones, he said, can easily become benchmarks for comparison, particularly in the age of social media.
He reminded the students that their lives should not be treated like a leaderboard. Instead of constantly comparing themselves with others, they should focus on becoming better than they were the previous day.
Alongside professional ambition, Modi stressed the importance of looking after physical and mental health.
Over 3,000 students graduate
The Prime Minister spent around 40 minutes at the convocation after arriving at the institute at about 11 am. He personally presented medals and certificates to nine students before leaving around 12.30 pm, after which other guests distributed degrees and diplomas to more than 3,000 graduating students.
Among those receiving degrees were 19-year-old BTech civil engineering student Anish Tanwar, the youngest graduate, and 74-year-old PhD student Chandra Shekhar Prasad, the oldest.
For the graduating batch, Modi’s central message was less about having all the answers and more about developing the courage to identify the right questions—and then staying determined enough to find solutions.
