Ashwini John: The Power of Forgiveness

Learn English with Ashwini John. In this inspiring 2017 Youth ICON Award–winning speech, Ashwini shares touching stories and powerful insights on forgiveness, healing, and emotional strength. Through personal examples, humour, and moving anecdotes, she explains why forgiveness unlocks happiness and frees us from anger, resentment, and pain.

Who This Speech Is For

• Learners who want to understand emotional vocabulary and personal storytelling.

• Those reflecting on forgiveness, empathy, and healing in daily life.

• Intermediate learners who want clear, expressive Indian English with strong moral themes.

How This Speech Helps Your English

• Shows how speakers use repetition to build emotional impact.

• Helps you learn vocabulary connected to compassion, healing, and personal growth.

• Demonstrates how real-life stories make a message relatable and memorable.

Why This Speech Matters

• Offers a powerful perspective on letting go of anger and reclaiming control of your life.

• Shares touching real stories that highlight human resilience, compassion, and emotional maturity.

• Encourages listeners to transform pain into strength by choosing forgiveness.

So before moving on to my topic for today, I have two basic questions for all of you, and I want you to raise your hands if you have done this in life. My first question is: how many of you have said sorry in life? Please raise your hands. Please clap for yourself. Round of applause. Please clap for yourself. Excellent. I told you to clap for yourself because it takes a very strong person to say sorry.

Now for my next question, I don’t want you to raise your hands, just think. How many of you have forgiven a person even though that person hasn’t asked you sorry? Just think. Just think. Today, before you leave Kotisha Hall, I am sure that I will create a spark within you which will make you think that I will. I will try to forgive. Yes.

My topic for today is forgiveness. We all know that forgiveness is an 11-letter word. Well, Elizabeth Max, the great writer, said that forgiveness is just a four-letter word. She said forgiveness is just a four-letter word: L-O-V-E, love. Thank you, thank you so much.

The very nature of us human beings is to get angry. We feel resentful when someone harms us, right? Well, I would say that forgiveness is forgetting the past and starting on with a clean slate. Forgiveness is like taking the knife out of your back which someone has poked you with and not using that knife to harm anyone else, no matter how badly they have hurt you.

Today, I would like to emphasize two aspects of forgiveness, only two. One, why can’t some people forgive? And two, the power of forgiveness.

So moving on to my first aspect, why can’t some people forgive? I feel that there are three main reasons why people can’t forgive, and my first reason is because we think we do not get an apology, right? We say, “He didn’t apologize.” She did not apologize. You know, I happened to read a small joke in WhatsApp, and the joke was like this. If a man says sorry when he knows that it is his mistake, “Yes, I’m wrong,” then he’s wise, he’s honest. Well, if a man says he’s sorry when he knows that he’s right and the opposite person is wrong, then unfortunately he’s a husband. Okay.

So you know, when I read this joke, what I felt was that we always expect people to come and say sorry to us. My dear friends, it is our memory, not theirs. People have different versions of forgiveness. People have very different versions of forgiveness. You know, if forgiveness was dependent on the apology of a particular person, then believe me, by now the whole world would have been burnt down.

My second point is that it is because they lack the ingredient of forgiveness within them. You know, I read a story once which had a yogi who saved a scorpion from a flooding river. A scorpion. So the yogi sees the scorpion is about to die, and he goes on to save the scorpion. As usual, the scorpion bites him. The yogi goes on again, the scorpion bites again, and this happens almost three times. A passing-by devotee looks at the yogi and asks, “What are you doing? Why are you saving the scorpion? It is biting you. Just leave it be.” The yogi’s reply was very different. You know what he said? He said, “When this little scorpion cannot let go his character of biting me, how can I let go my character of helping him?”

The yogi was able to practice forgiveness in his life only because he contained the ingredient of forgiveness within him, and that, my friends, is love and compassion. We cannot love unless and until we forgive a person.

The third aspect why I feel that people cannot forgive is that we do not understand the difference between weakness and wickedness. If a person hurts you, he or she might be weak, my friends, not wicked. How many of you don’t have weakness here? We all have weakness. We are not strong people. We all have weakness. We all are capable of hurting someone. I know that very clearly. When we are so eager to receive forgiveness by someone, why are we not willing to give forgiveness to someone?

That is my question, my friends. When I tell you to forgive, “You must forgive, you must forgive,” you might ask me, “Then what do we do to those people who hurt a woman? What do we do to those people who harassed a girl? What do we do to all those people who kill thousands of men? Should I forgive them? When we complain to the police, is that forgiveness?” No, that is not forgiveness. We have a misconception about forgiveness, actually. When you complain to the police, you’re complaining about that person’s particular act, not about that person. When the police does something favorable to you, it is like applying medicine on your wound. The wound won’t disappear, my friends. Unless and until you forgive, the wound is still there.

So moving on to my second aspect of today, that is the main heading, the power of forgiveness, I believe there are three major powers you gain when you forgive someone, and the main power is that you lead a happy and healthy life. Yes, it is about you. When you forgive someone, you are healing yourself, your mind, your body, and your soul.

The second power I feel you gain is that when you forgive someone, you are coming out of their control. You stop being the victim. And I can say this because I have an experience. I was rejected from a school-level quiz competition because I wasn’t the topper of my class. To everyone who is seated here who has faced partiality, I just have two choices for you. These were the choices my mother gave me. She told me, “If you want to come out of the situation, you have two choices, Ashwini. You have two choices. One, either you continue to feel hurt, anger, and depression, or you come out of the situation. Stop being the victim of what they did.” And I came out of the situation, I gained my confidence back, and I want you to re-empower yourself.

The third power you gain is that when you forgive someone, you come out of the emotions of anger, depression, and sadness. Once when I visited an orphanage, I happened to see a boy. His name was Ram. He was 13 years old, and he was autistic. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t speak well. I just understood four to five points of what he said, and that changed my life. When I spoke to him, he told me, “My mother abandoned me. I was thrown into the dustbin. I did not know what mistake I did. I really did not know. But to come out of the situation, I forgave my mother and now I am happy.” When I heard his story, my dear friends, I felt that we all are physically not well because we have brains, but we lack a heart. Ram out there, who was an autistic patient, had brains and had a heart. I can say that. I can say that with full confidence.

There is a story about Sister Maria. She was a nun from Kerala, and she was stabbed 50 times. She was stabbed 50 times by a villager because the villager misunderstood what she did. He did not understand that she came to do social service and he stabbed her. He killed her. When Sister Maria’s mother came the next day to see her daughter, she saw her daughter lying there. She saw that little girl she had cherished from a very young age, lying there, speaking in silence with her. She saw her daughter just lying there helpless, who was stabbed 51 times and had various injuries all over her body. You know what her mother did? She forgave that person, that person who killed her daughter. She said, “My son, I forgive you because I know you did it out of some intention and it is okay.”

I, Ashwini John, as a youngster, as a human being, just have a very small advice for all of you. I know we all have been hurt in life, we all have grudges in life. Okay. Forgive them. Just forgive them. Not because they deserve your forgiveness, not because you asked for their forgiveness, but because you cannot move on without forgiving a person. It shows your maturity level. Your forgiveness speaks about you, not about them. Forgiveness is your gift towards yourself, from yourself. You just have to search within. Thank you so much.