Speech: Carve Meaning, Dare to Emerge From Silence to Significance
The Carvers of Meaning
Opening
بِسْمِ اللّٰہِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِیْمِ
Dear graduates, esteemed faculty, honored guests,
Let me begin with Allama Iqbal:
“ہزاران سال با فطرت نشستم
بہ او پیوستم اور از خود گسستم
ولیکن سرگذشتم یہ سہ حرفست
تراشیدم، پرستیدم، شکستم”
For thousands of years, I sat in harmony with nature.
I joined it… and I detached myself from my own identity.
But my story can be summed in three acts:
I carved. I worshipped. I broke apart.
These are not mere words, they are the syntax of civilization itself.
‘I carved’… Creation in motion.
‘I worshipped’… Belief, the scaffolding of existence.
‘I broke apart’… The courage to question, to deconstruct.
You, linguists, are trained to see the grammar of all three.
The measure of your courage, the value of your deeds, is not in the comfort of observation but in the commitment to act, to carve, to speak, and to shape reality with purpose.
1 – Carving Reality: The Phenomenological Gap
Language is a double-edged sword.
Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer warn: shape the world into words, and you inhabit the map—not the territory.
The raw, untamed life slips through your fingers.
You have mastered syntax, semantics, pragmatics, but have you tasted the pre-linguistic essence of life?
The true peril is not ignorance—it is mistaking the label for the thing itself.
Your calling: bridge the chasm between the lived and the spoken.
Reconnect humans to the unwritten, the unspoken, the unseen meaning behind every word.
2 – Listening to Silence: The Ethical Imperative
Wittgenstein wrote:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
But silence is not emptiness, it is potential. The unspoken framework of truth.
Every unheard voice, every suppressed story, waits for a linguist brave enough to give it form.
Your work is to illuminate the fissures where meaning has been muted.
Pragmatics teaches intention. Ethics teaches responsibility.
Scholarship is not measured in citations, it is measured in the truths you bring to life.
3 – Speaking the World: The Performative Act
Austin and Searle remind us: words are not just words, they act.
Every lecture, every conversation, every sentence moves reality itself.
You are architects of meaning.
Slogans build nations. Laws define justice. Contracts shape economies.
All through words transformed into deeds.
The pen is not merely mightier than the sword, it is creation in your hands.
Armed with knowledge, you can carve a wiser, better world.
4 – The Crisis of Knowledge: Fragmentation & Responsibility
The world you inherit is fractured. Knowledge is precise, yet often hollow.
Research piles like bricks; wisdom remains unbuilt.
Mastery without courage is sterile. True scholarship demands confronting life itself, not just texts.
Society asks: What is the purpose of linguistics if it cannot engage, listen, and transform?
Do not fear this question, it is the crucible that turns scholars into philosophers, thinkers into creators.
5 – The Hope and Challenge: Becoming Modern Philosophers
Now comes your mission:
If Pakistan has no philosophers, be the first.
If discourse is dominated by silence, be the voice.
If the world forgets the moral weight of language, carry it forward.
Your work is not merely to study, it is to perform, to educate, to speak boldly, to carve meaning where it has been lost.
Every sentence you analyze is a blueprint. Every word you speak a brick in civilization’s edifice.
Iqbal carved, worshipped, broke apart, your task is to carve ethically, speak courageously, and act wisely.
The Arena of Meaning
Graduates, you are stepping into the arena.
You will stumble. You will err. But rise again you must, driven by curiosity, devotion, and audacity.
Each word you speak, each sentence you craft, is a brick in the architecture of a wiser, more humane world.
At best, you achieve brilliance; at worst, you fail, but you fail while daring greatly, leaving no silence unchallenged, no truth unpursued.
The measure of your courage, the value of your deeds, is not in comfort or observation, but in commitment: to act, to carve, to speak, and to shape reality with purpose.
Theodore Roosevelt
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Step forward, graduates. Go forth and carve the world anew.
