The culture of inviting chief guests to special events has become so deeply rooted in our society today so much so that we just cannot do away with it. We have been conditioned into believing that any important event cannot be held without the presence of a chief guest. Be it a jubilee event, a conference, or any other event of significance, the program is incomplete with the speech of a chief guest. Much has been discussed about this chief guest culture across various platforms over the years and, slowly, there arrived a semblance of change. At least the words “chief guest” began to be sidelined. Now we see the words like special guest or patron more commonly used these days. While it indicates that people’s perceptions are changing, we seem to be still struggling to let go of the chief guest culture because dropping a word and picking another for its place without quitting the practice is not going to help. The intent of inviting a chief guest is (was) in anticipation of hefty monetary donations. We realized it was wrong. So we dropped the words ‘chief guest’ and adopted the words ‘special guest’ while expecting the same monetary donations from the guest. That’s actually not the way to change things.
It is uncomfortable, and even uneasy, to listen to a wrong special guest talk about an unlikely subject to the wrong gathering. For instance, a politician talking about faith in a students’ organization general body meeting. The ideal way to move forward would be to invite the right person as a special invitee to any given event. For instance, it will be much more realistic to invite an accomplished sportsperson as a special invitee to a sporting event. Similarly, inviting a successful entrepreneur as a special invitee to address young people in a youth program would be more appropriate than inviting a bureaucrat to talk about employment opportunities. We also often see educational institutions inviting politicians as special guests to their events instead of inviting educationists. These are small changes that we can adopt which in due course of time will bring about permanent change in our society. We tend to focus more on the amount of money that a special invitee is expected to donate, and in the process forget about the significance or purpose of inviting a special guest in the first place.
Ideally, the best practice would be to organize an event without inviting any guest as ‘special’ but if it is necessary to invite a special guest, then at least the focus should not be on the amount of money we expect that ‘special’ guest to donate.