Sporting a pink turban and speaking as chief guest at the convocation ceremony of the '98-99 engineering batch of the Dnyaneshwar Vidyapeeth, Mashelkar, after shaking hands energetically with all the 131 graduates, the boys wearing saffron turbans, exhorted the budding engineers to be innovators not imitators, with compassion for society and passion for work.

``Our education is too compartmentalised and one-dimensional,'' he said, and is ill-equipped to provide the new breed of engineering scientists emerging out of the fast-vanishing differences between engineering and science.

With `innovation' the focus of his address, Mashelkar said it was time for society to shed its intolerance of innovative ideas, risks, experiments and even failure, for they lead to success. Citing the example of billionaire Bill Gates, he expressed the hope that the students before him would learn to convert knowledge into wealth and social good through innovation.

On patents, a passionate subject for him, he said that the future wars would be `knowledge wars,' fought with weapons of information and technology, and India's naivete in this subject could prove very expensive for her.

``Life is the greatest laboratory,'' said Vice-chancellor of Dnyaneshwar Vidyapeeth Dr Vijay Bhatkar, adding that the Dnyaneshwar Vidyapeeth was striving to provide a creative and cultural dimension to learning, which education lacks today. ``Education should not be merely skill-based, but must revolve around ideas and innovation,'' he said. ``The centre of education should shift from infrastructure to the students.''

Chancellor of the 20-year-old Vidyapeeth, Dr Manohar Apte, in his speech interspersed with quotes from Confucius to Osho, stressed the increasing significance of learning by discussion and experimentation. ``The best asset of our students is their independence of thought and self-confidence,'' he said.

Sudhir Gadgil was the compere for the convocation at the National Film Archives of India. Environmentalist Mohan Dharia was present among the audience.