TEDxMumbai: An eight-hour brain massage

At the end of TEDxMumbai on Saturday, April 3, the two hundred people that have packed Blue Frog all day are trickling out reluctantly, while the 17,759 viewers who have watched the live global webcast are surfing away to other sites. The conference has been an eight-hour brain massage. My co-organizers and speakers are hugging each other. I feel indescribable joy and unbelievable tiredness.

The previous night we were excitedly mingling at a small pre-event dinner at the Bombay Gymkhana club, in the Far Pavilion, a private events room. It was the first time that we were all together, after months of planning over email, phone calls and some personal visits. Some speakers were battling jetlag, some had faced flight delays and slow moving city traffic to get to us on time. 

Suddenly some club officials barged into our party and asked that one of our speakers, Laxmi Tripathi, leave the party. No reasons were given, but it seemed obvious that they did not want a transgender person within their club's premises, even if it was a private party and she was an invited guest. They threatened club members present at the party saying they would lose their club memberships if they didn’t comply.

Now, Laxmi is India’s leading transgender activist and has lectured all over the world, including at the United Nations headquarters in New York. She shrugged it off as yet another instance of hypocrisy that she encounters on a daily basis in her country of birth. But for many others, such as young Cara Eastcott, a TEDX Mumbai speaker who had relocated to India a year ago from Canada, it was the first direct incident of discrimination that they were witnessing in their lives.

As we all staged a silent walkout of the club premises, I thought of the films "LSD", "DevD", and the book "White Tiger", and all the other recent narratives of the underbelly of India Shining. Modernity is about attitudes, not objects, and certainly not about a geographical location (south Bombay) or an elite club therein.

TEDx Mumbai's success the next day renews my spirit, to a certain extent. 

Bringing TED to town

I can’t believe it was only three months ago that the organizing committee first met. We were a random bunch of people -- bankers, techies, advertising folks and creative artists. All we had in common was that we’d attended the TED India conference in Mysore in November 2009 and wanted to bring some of that magic back home to Mumbai.

The logistics fell into place surprisingly easily. Ajay Hattangdi applied for and obtained the TEDx licence. Mahesh Mathai offered us Blue Frog for the venue and Cleartrip.com agreed to sponsor the event. Our challenge as organizers lay in pulling together the best possible lineup of speakers, and paying the same amount of attention towards curating a compelling and diverse audience.

We realized that we didn’t have a problem of scarcity but of abundance. There were so many amazing people in India, doing incredible things. Who should we pick? Which ideas?

Our final choices, split over three sessions -- Hopes and Dreams, Wild Animals, and Urbanscape -- made us proud on the Blue Frog stage.

Topical variety

Laxmi, not unexpectedly, gets a standing ovation with her life story about her transformation from a simple middle class Thane boy to a globe trotting diva. She asks pointed questions. "You clap now, but how many of you will hire a hijra in your house as a driver or cook?" 

Dr Ganesh Devy of the Bhasha Institute moves many of us, including me, to tears with his plea to stop the murder of Indian languages. "Languages don’t die. We murder them… Every language is a world view. Let diversity live." His elegant slides were as evocative as his words.

Devy’s talk resonates with that of Kishore Rithe, tiger conservationist. Both talk about eco-systems of knowledge that need to be protected. Both talk of holistic solutions.

Equally evocative are Zubin Pastakia’s images of Bombay’s single-screen cinemas. Zubin chooses to see these cinemas as sites of current activity and space explorations instead of through what he calls a "debilitating nostalgic lens". But how can one not feel nostalgic after learning that several of the cinemas that Zubin photographed a mere three years ago, have already been torn down?

But TEDx Mumbai is not just about filmi rona-dhona, in case you’re beginning to feel like that's the case.

Mumbai observations

Steven Baker’s autobiographical experiences of a Bollywood gora have the audience in splits. "Most of us don’t realize that it is harder to get off a Mumbai train than get on," Baker narrated. "So once we reach Goregaon, only half of us manage to get off to go to the studios, while the other half are still stuck in the train, on the way to Malad!"

Anupam Kher’s comic gems are bang on, as always. "My teacher," he relays, "told me even if I competed in a single person race, I would still come second."

Dr Raghunathan’s views on the peculiar qualities of Indians have many in the audience smiling and nodding their heads in agreement.

Dhanashree Pandit-Rai’s heavenly voice and masterful explanation of the difference between Indian and Western music draws audible "aahs" and a minute-long round of applause. We learn about khatkas, murkis, andolans and gamas. We also learn about how infectious a person's passion can be as Dhanashree bounds all over the stage, radiating her joy for music towards us.

It’s not just Dhanashree. I am moved by the passion of all of the presenters at TEDxMumbai. I am also impressed by their solution-oriented approaches. These are not just people who are gathering in Blue Frog armchairs to nurse single malts and crib about how wrong things are. They’re actually doing something about it.

Positive energy

So Nisha Yadav, a TIFR astro-physicist, is spending years on decoding the language of the Harappan civilization, a problem that hasn’t been solved even after a hundred years of research. Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove are urban planners who’ve set up office in Dharavi. They’re looking at Dharavi as a site for solutions, as a model for the kind of user-generated city that Mumbai could become, and see parallels of this modernity in the similar urbanscape of Tokyo. Viren Rasquinha, former Olympian and Indian hockey captain is channelizing his fury at India’s inability to win Olympic gold medals by setting up an academy to train elite athletes.

How do we take all this amazing positive energy and unleash it within the rest of the city, I wonder?

Maybe we don’t need to. I think that my biggest takeaway from the conference was the connections that I made, not just with the speakers but with the audience members during the lunch and other breaks. Maybe the point of TEDx is just that -- to offer a space for unexpected connections, and allow them to grow in unexpected directions.

Parmesh Shahani, who co-organized and co-hosted TEDxMumbai, is a TED fellow, and the author of "Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India" (Sage, 2008). To watch videos from TEDxMumbai once they become available online, please track tedxmumbai.com.