TED COMES TO INDIA, AND VICE-VERSA!

By Russell Smith

A couple of us at SDD Global Solutions had the privilege of attending TEDIndia.  To call this conference mind-blowing would be not only to use a cliché.  It also would be to engage in understatement.  It seems that for many of the over 900 business leaders, artists, non-profit organizers, lawyers, film directors, scientists, venture capitalists, designers, spiritual luminaries, philanthropists, movie stars, students, inventors, philosophers, government officials, and authors who gathered from all over the world for four days in Mysore this week, it was a life-changing experience.   It is impossible to carry on “business as usual” after attending TED.   As one speaker, educator Shukla Bose, put it (and I am paraphrasing):  “Write your own obituary.  If you are not happy with the way it reads, change your life.” We also learned, among countless other things, that India is likely to be the focal point for changing the world.  

For those of you not familiar with TED, its mantra is “ideas worth spreading.”  Originally conceived in 1984 with the purpose of bringing together the worlds of technology, entertainment, and design (and in the process, forming the acronym, TED), the organization now brings together the world’s most fascinating speakers and doers in virtually all fields.  TED challenges each of them to deliver “the talk of their lives,” in 18 minutes.  Past speakers have included such “big names” as Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, Jane Goodall, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono. 

But one of the hallmarks of TED is that many of the attendees are just as interesting as the speakers, if not more so, and TEDIndia was no exception.  Added to the mix this time were 103 “fellows” – essentially the most courageous, imaginative, inspiring and accomplished young people in India and the rest of Asia.  They attended the conference free of charge, but they added plenty of “charge” to the event, in the form of energy, excitement, and uplift. Unlike so many international conferences, TED India was not even close to being dominated by wealthy, middle-aged, North American men. 

So what was it like, in particular?

It was a chance, coffee-break encounter with Ali Babar, a precocious 16-year-old boy from West Bengal, who handed me his business card, which signified that he was the “Headmaster” of a school.  I assumed he made the same mistake I made once, which is to hand out, by accident, someone else’s card.  I made this incorrect assumption before I saw Ali on stage the next day, and before I learned that he actually is a worldwide hero, even a media celebrity, who took matters into his own hands at the age of nine, by organizing an outdoor afternoon school (with no funding, and no building) now comprised of 800 child laborers in his village – children who otherwise would have no education at all.  After meeting and hearing Ali Babar, I am humbled and motivated.  Our company has received funding in the seven figures, yet I feel we have not done nearly as much as this boy has accomplished with nothing but drive and ingenuity.

TEDIndia was me standing in line at the bar at a Barclays-sponsored gala at Lalitha Mahal Palace, trying to make the agonizing decision of whether to have orange juice or wine, and then falling into a conversation with a world-famous neuroscientist.  She patiently explained to me, during our long wait, and in dismaying detail, the damaging effects of alcohol on brain cells, demonstrated by brain scan images.  I lamely replied with a quote from a Lou Reed song, “The Power of Positive Drinking.”  Lou sang that “some say liquor kills the cells in your head, but for that matter, so does getting out of bed.”  This was no match for the neuroscientist.

TEDIndia was finding out, at the end of a howlingly funny and wildly informative presentation by Swedish professor Hans Rosling, that according to computer models and statistics, July 27th, 2048 is the exact date when India will catch up with the U.S. in terms of average income per capita.  For this, Professor Rosling earned the first of countless standing ovations that the enthusiastic TED audience delivered to speakers at this conference.  Another news flash from Rosling:  The first tweet was in 1858, after the completion of the first transatlantic cable.  U.S. President Buchanan tweeted to Queen Victoria, as follows: "This will help diffuse liberty throughout the world."

TEDIndia was networking.  It was literally bumping into a French owner of an Indo-French technology company, which is developing software for the legal outsourcing industry (the one we’re in).  I had an animated conversation with him, followed by his introducing me to two London film production company owners, who quickly expressed an interest in hiring our company and my law firm.  TEDIndia was me talking to Parmesh Shahani, the author of “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love, and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India,” and bringing a smile to Parmesh’s face when I informed him that his book is in the window at the Infosys company bookstore.  TEDIndia was me sitting next to a stranger on the bus, during a field trip to an innovative charity hospital in a poor village, only to find out that the stranger is the manager of a three-billion-dollar, India-focused venture capital fund, and that he thinks what we’re doing at SDD Global is “amazing.”  TEDIndia also involved my sitting down to lunch next to another stranger, who turned out to be an expert in a subject I want to learn:  how to bring together spirituality and commerce. (She works for the Business and Consciousness Initiative.)  As the popular blogger and author, Amit Varma, put it:  “TED India means having to bring an extra suitcase just to hold all of your business cards.” As the self-appointed ambassador for the legal outsourcing industry at the conference (hey, we were the only company in our field to participate), I ran out of cards half-way through.

TEDIndia was stunning synchronicity in action.  Here’s one example.  Social activist Sunitha Krishnan disturbed and roused the crowd with an angry, old-fashioned, agitprop invective against the scandalously horrific treatment of Indian girls by human traffickers.  This was tempered by Sunitha’s heartwarmingly positive stories about some of the more than 3,200 involuntary prostitutes she has rescued from Indian brothels, through her organization, Prajwala. After the talk, there was a computer malfunction, delaying a musical performance.  The musician said that after the talk, he was so upset that he almost could not go forward with the performance anyway.  During the awkward moments while the glitch was being fixed, a lone woman in the audience stood up, without a microphone.  She told us all, in a loud voice, that she would donate $10,000 to the Prajwala rehabilitation center, if 10 others would do the same.  Within about 4 seconds, 15 donors raised their hands to take up the challenge.  A talk, a glitch, a courageous voice, and over $150,000 was raised to save an orphanage that otherwise faced eviction by its landlord, who wants to turn the building into a shopping mall.

TEDIndia was fun.  At one of the nightly parties, the Indian choreographer for “Slumdog Millionaire,” Longinus Fernandes, while looking strangely like James Brown, enticed a couple hundred of us onto a large stage, and then proceeded to lead us all in an absurdly humorous attempt at group dancing / hand waiving, accompanied by thunderous, thumping, Bollywood disco Asian fusion music.   Yes, I used the word, “us.”  After much resistance, even I succumbed. I jumped on the stage as soon as the opening chords of “Jai Ho” sounded.  I seriously hope this does not appear on YouTube.  I believe I share this hope with several captains of industry, who were waiving their hands in the air like they just didn’t care.  Now, in the sober light of day, perhaps they do.

As mentioned above, the conference also included amazing speakers.  It would take over a dozen pages just to summarize all of the ideas they shared.  Here are just a few:

SHASHI THAROOR – INDIAN GOVERNMENT MINISTER

 

The erudite Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed author as well as Indian Minister of State for External Affairs (next job:  Secretary General of the U.N.), brought the crowd to its feet with a polished, effectively delivered speech on the future of India.  I guess it was the presence of Minister Tharoor, as well as that of “His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa,” the successor to the Dalai Lama, which led to the massive security at the conference, including dozens of militarized police, wearing camouflage and toting automatic rifles.  

 

In response to the increasingly frequent predictions that India and China will become the new “world leaders” and “superpowers,” Minister Tharoor openly questioned the meaning of those phrases.  Do they mean military and economic might?  He says no.  He says the country that rises to leadership will be the one that projects “soft power.”  In other words, it will be the country that attracts others by the power of example.  Simply put, Tharoor argues that the country that leads the world will be the one that tells the best stories.  That nation is India.  He mentioned the incredible story of the cell phone revolution, in which phones are being purchased by the hundreds of millions, in large part by farmers and fishermen, bettering their lives through the sharing of economic, political and other information.  He went on to embrace the amazing story of India’s hugely diverse, plural democracy, in which people of disparate religions, ethnicity, cultures, and languages have learned to live together.  He cited the story of how, in a country that is 90% Hindu, the people elected a party led by an Italian Catholic (Sonia Gandhi), who turned over the Prime Minister position to a Sikh (Manmohan Singh), who in turn was sworn in by the then-President, a Muslim (A.P.J. Abdul Kalam).  Minister Tharoor also marveled at how India’s differing groups have reached a profound consensus on how to handle their lack of consensus.   

PRANAV MISTRY -- INVENTOR

MIT’s Pranav Mistry, perhaps one of the two or three top inventors alive today, who wowed previous TED audiences and the world with his “Sixth Sense” device, did it again at TEDIndia.  In the question and answer session after his presentation, he made world headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere, by casually mentioning that within a matter of months, he will be making his incredibly valuable software available to the world for free, on an open source basis.  For those of you have been living under a rock, “Sixth Sense” is a wearable, hi-tech device that turns your hand into a phone, your wrist into a watch, your newspaper into a video screen, and any product at a grocery store into a wealth of information about ingredients, health, ethics, well-being and comparative pricing.   At TEDIndia, Pranav demonstrated further improvements to the device, including the ability to turn any piece of paper into a computer.  He obviously is being courted by every major IT company in the world, which makes his open source announcement all the more astounding.

TONY HSIEH – CEO 

Tony Hsieh, CEO of the phenomenally successful online retailer, Zappos, gave a riveting talk on happiness as a business model.  The TED blog summarized his talk as follows:

Although we know his company as an online retailer of shoes and clothing, he really aims to create happiness in customers and happiness in employees. He's talking about happiness as a business model. He underscores passion, quoting Puff Daddy: "Don't chase the paper, chase the dream." He highlights the importance of company culture. And as everyone's ultimate goal is happiness for he spends a little time talking about the science of happiness and different types of happiness. Great businesses combine pleasure, passion and purpose, Hsieh concludes.

 

In that vein, Tony talked about how people often are very bad at predicting what will make them happy (lottery winners being one of the best examples), which is why the science of happiness needs to be studied.  I hope that he and the audience understand that happiness in a business setting can mean different things for people in different countries.  For example, although money and status may have diminishing returns for many in the West, those things can bring some degree of happiness to many employees in India, for religious, historical, and cultural reasons, even if money and status are not enough for the full, lasting happiness of anyone anywhere.  For me, another important point Tony made, besides the importance of happiness as a corporate goal, was the argument that successful companies must have “committable core values,” not just mission statements that are written for PR purposes and then essentially thrown away.  By “committable,” he means that you should be able to walk the talk, and even hire and fire on the basis of those values. 

 

At our own company, we once had an incident in which managers did not take legitimate employee complaints seriously enough.  We are not going to fire anyone simply because of a TED talk.  But Tony’s presentation confirmed my belief that if we are serious about the values we espouse, including respect for each and every employee, then those ultimately responsible for such incidents, namely the managers, must be held accountable in their monthly performance review.  On the positive side, Tony’s talk confirmed the wisdom of our efforts to introduce more fun into the workweek, such as our “Movie of the Week,” which involves our resident “VJ” (and outstanding lawyer), Ashish Kumar, taking employee polls and choosing a movie to show on most Friday afternoons, during working hours.  We’ve interviewed several job candidates who told us, when asked what they know about our company, that one of the attractions is our low-pressure work environment, exemplified by Ashish’s “Movie of the Week.”

 

Three other points from Tony Hseih’s talk:  (1) The only way employees can see work as a calling is if they are growing personally and professionally the entire time, (2) follow vision first, not money -- the latter will come if you are truly committed to your vision, and (3) on a related note, do what you would be happy to do for 10 years, even if you did not make a dime of profit.  I also was encouraged to learn from Tony that it took over four years for his company to get organized around all of the above principles, and even longer for them to pay off.  It makes me feel better to see how far our company has come in three years, and I am less disappointed that we are not yet fully there.

 

DEVDUTT PATTANAIK – CHIEF BELIEF OFFICER

 

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik, “Chief Belief Officer” of the Future Group, one of India’s largest corporations, gave the best talk on comparative mythology I have ever heard.  I took mythology courses at Columbia, and none of them were anywhere near as compelling as this talk about the “business of mythology.”  For example, Dr. Pattanaik compared the linear mythology of the West, based on the idea of winning at all costs, and on being heroic and spectacular during our brief time on earth, with the cyclical mythology of the East, in which “death” is only a passage way, like everything else. 

 

He also told the story of Ganesha’s race around the world with his brother, Kartikeya, to illustrate the difference between “my world” and “the world.”  Kartikeya took a long time to circle “the world,” because it is objective, containing all of the plants, the animals, the sky, the mountains, the clouds, the rivers, and the stars.  But Ganesha won the race, by circling the subjective “my world” of thoughts and feelings, dreams and memories.  The lesson, which I believe was a contrast between the Western and the Eastern, and perhaps even between the masculine and the feminine, was that what matters most is what we alone feel, rather that what everyone sees. 

 

Dr. Pattanaik also contrasted the Western God, who issued the Ten Commandments, with Hinduism, where there are no scriptural mandates at all, and where the believers never know where they stand with the deities.  He explained that this is one of the reasons why in the Hindu faith, people go to the temple to have an audience with God, not with a priest.  This also is why the physical representations of the Hindu deities usually have large eyes – because they are open and empathic.   (I wonder if this is why Ganesha takes the form of an elephant, with such large ears, all the better to hear!)  Devdutt talked about how these myths affect business practices, as well as shaping the course of history.  To mention one example, he talked about a ritual in his company, in which a new manager is blindfolded and surrounded by his colleagues before he gets his or her title.  When the blindfold is removed, and the manager is able to see the employees and empathize with them, he is ready to be a manager.  In Devdutt’s words:

 

A leader must see his people. He must recognize them for who they are, rather than what he wants them to be. More often than not, leaders don’t have eyes – or rather they see only themselves. Their eyes are only for their vision of the world. They do not realize there are others around them with other visions of life. This lack of eyes strips them of all empathy. Everything is measured and valued against their own vision. Those who align with their vision are good; those fail to do so are bad. Intellectual leaders with an intellectual outlook of things therefore look down upon people who are not intellectual. Emotional leaders keep advising non-emotional team members to transform for their betterment. Task oriented leaders do not value people oriented team members and vice versa. In other words, they see nothing but themselves and constantly seek themselves in others. They notice no one else.

 

Although I believe Dr. Pattanaik prefers Hindu mythology over Greek, he said that when asked the question of which is best, his answer is the Indian headbobble, a circular motion that combines both yes and no in one gesture.  At this, the conclusion of his talk, the audience gave Devdutt an unambiguous, enthusiastic, standing and laughing ovation. 

 

EVE ENSLER – PLAYWRIGHT

Acclaimed playright Eve Ensler delivered an “in your face” feminist testimonial that rocked the house, at least half of which was Indian.  Here’s the summary from the TED blog: 

She asks us to get in touch with our “girl self” -- an attribute that is a part of every human being, but which has been suppressed by cultural power-structures. She says “being a girl is so powerful that we've taught everyone not to be that.” She takes us to Congo, where women are raped routinely as a part of the barbaric conflict. She takes us to her childhood, where her father abused her sexually -- and she realized that her crying exposed his brutality. It’s a travesty, she says, that young boys are taught to be cold, hardened, to behave without tenderness or compassion. Just as girls are oppressed, they are also objectified, and also “trained to please.” Girls must be taught to educate. The fate of the girl is entwined with the fate of humankind. The capacity for girls to overcome situations is mind-blowing -- as a species, we need to learn from that capacity. She closes with a powerful, energizing reading from “I Am an Emotional Creature.” 

Yet another standing ovation.  One of Ms. Ensler’s most memorable lines, referring to what often happens when young men are taught that “boys don’t cry,” was this one:  “Bullets are hardened tears.”  In honor of the amazing Eve Ensler, I will tell you that I cried several times during TEDIndia talks.  But they were always tears of joy.  I also have to confess the unimaginable.  During a song medley by Indian superstar vocalist Usha Uthup, I joined the crowd in singing “We are the World.” I even waved my arms in the air!  Again, I hope this does not appear on YouTube.

C.K. PRAHALAD – WORLD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL BUSINESS THINKER  

Named by Thinkers 50 as the #1 business visionary in the world for 2009 (numbers 2, 3, and 4 are Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Krugman, and Steve Jobs), C.K. Prahalad gave a sophisticated lecture.  It seemed to dovetail with his bestselling, pathbreaking book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” Dr. Prahalad identifies the world’s poor (the “bottom of the pyramid”) as a mostly untapped market for companies, worth up to $13 trillion a year in revenues.  In his words, “the real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers.  It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.” A market at the bottom of the pyramid could be co-created by multi-national and domestic industry, non-governmental organizations and, most importantly, the poor themselves.  In his TED talk, Dr. Prahalad warned against “learning disabilities” on the part of companies, leading to mistakes, such as mistaking current profits for leadership, and unwillingness to face up to capability gaps.  He seems to be saying that the answer lies in democratizing technology, communication, and learning, such that everybody from the top to the bottom will know what’s going on.  

HORST RECHELBACHER – FOUNDER OF AVEDA

Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of Aveda (purchased by Estee Lauder for a fortune) and the new nonprofit organic cosmetics company, Intelligent Nutrients, gave an interesting talk, combining business with spirituality, and environmentalism with cosmetics.  He began with a story of how the Buddha actually gave people the (middle) finger, by which he meant “you are one with everything,” not “go to hell.”  Horst says the best way to be an environmentalist is to live a lifestyle of responsible consumption.  Here’s the summary from the TED Blog:

Everything is based on cause and effect -- the law of karma -- so human beings should be mindful of the chain of consequences. Particularly, the ubiquity of toxic chemicals in daily products can have damaging effects on our health. The lips, for example, are the fastest delivery system for the body, so the toxic petrochemicals in lipstick go directly into the bloodstream. That is why he has developed an organic beauty line, including a mineral-rich lipstick that makes kissing more nutritious!

SHAFFI MATHER – PIONEER OF FOR-PROFIT SOLUTIONS

 

Social entrepreneur Shaffi Mather brought the TEDIndia audience to its feet with amazing examples of profitable enterprises that change the world for the better. The following is from the TED Blog:

 

He founded a 911-like emergency medical response service called Ambulance Access for All. It's a fully sustainable business that is completely free of charge to victims, yet does not require public funds. (His system provided medical care to 125 victims of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year.) Now he's branching out, creating Education Access for All and Moksha Yug Access. He talks about his new venture: a system to fight corruption and improve transparency in big business and in government. (He stresses that corruption is not a black-and-white issue: any common person can be driven, by need, to bribery.) He wants to fight corruption by creating a "pest-control-like service" that will allow citizens to press back against the factors that contribute to it.

 

As a business executive whose Indian company sometimes is the target of shake-downs by local officials, I was mesmerized by Shaffi’s stories, including the fact that out of 42 cases where his new company (seemingly modeled after Ghostbusters) exposed and took a stand against corruption, the guilty officials backed down.  Equally remarkable is the fact that in every case, the cost of fighting back was far less than the amount of the bribe the officials demanded.  I believe this could me a monumental model for developing countries everywhere.

 

KIRAN BIR SETHI – EDUCATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

Kiran Bir Sethi, who founded the amazing Riverside School in Ahmedabad, also brought the house down, with her stories of how children in some ways took over the city, influencing government officials, business owners, and even their own parents, to change their ways for the good.  This from the TED blog:

She says “contagious is a good word -- even in the age of H1N1. Laughter is contagious too.” She wants us to get infected with “I can.” She shows video clips of common practices at Riverside School -- practices that give children the feeling that they can go out and change the world. By making children aware of learning, enabling them to teach themselves, the system empowers them to teach others -- including their own parents. The public service aspect of the program may seem a diversion from core education programming, but the students at Riverside have shown to out-perform other students in math, science, and English studies.

ANIL GUPTA – FOUNDER OF THE HONEYBEE NETWORK

I guess it is no accident that nearly all of my favorite speakers received a standing ovation, and Anil Gupta is yet another of them.  This, from the TED Blog:            

As the founder of the Honeybee Network, Anil Gupta and his team search the world for low-cost innovations created out of the necessities of poverty. Today, at TEDIndia, he energizes the audience by animatedly explaining his creative model and showing the amazing inventions they've come across.  He speaks on behalf of those in villages and slums who have solved their local problems, ingeniously, without outside help. “I realized I am an exploiter,” he says, because his own success is based on knowledge he learned from many people -- people who remain anonymous and unacknowledged. If India wants to be a knowledge society, it must give recognition to those whose ingenuity has taught us how to solve these specific problems.  He started Honey Bee Network to help spread great, local ideas to the world, while giving those who generate them the proper compensation -- in such a way that the “flower doesn't mind that the pollen is taken.” The Honey Bee Network wants to create markets for artists, craftsmen, inventors -- so people can be paid for what they are good at.

I was especially enthralled by Anil’s account, documented with video footage, of a destitute, elderly, illiterate farmer who invented and manufactured an amphibious bicycle, so that he could cross a flood zone to reach his wife.  While watching this frail farmer pedaling across the water on his bike, I could not help but think:  Is there anything the Indian people cannot do; is there anything our Indian employees cannot achieve;  when it comes to ingenuity and innovation, provided there is enough inspiration and incentive?

SHUKLA BOSE – CORPORATE LEADER TURNED EDUCATOR

Another recipient of a “standing O,” Shukla Bose provided tremendous inspiration for me and I think everyone.  Here’s the TED Blog summary:

Shukla Bose founded the Parikrama schools -- a system for poor children in India that gives individual attention and gets spectacular results.   She recalls her successes in corporate life -- accomplishments that left her still wanting more. After trying to write her own obituary, and realizing she had nothing to say about herself, she left the for-profit world and instead invested herself in educating the poor. She was soon overwhelmed by the numbers: hundreds of millions of Indian children lacking education, literacy, math skills. Instead of fixating on the daunting numbers, she decided to focus on “just one child”: bringing one child at a time through a complete education. Thus, Parikrama Foundation was born. After six years, over 1,000 children from slums and orphanages have joined her education system. Her system disproves the myth that learning English is beyond the reach of children from slums. Now she's extending the program to educate and improve the lives of parents as well. The program remains focused on empowering "one child at a time" -- never getting bogged down with questions of "scale," and continuing to focus on quality of education.

I was especially impressed by the videos showing slum children, who had studied English for only three months, speaking the language fluently and effectively.  Given that English is the language of globalization, and also given the strange fact that no other language, including Hindi, has as much reach across the many states of India, in which over 50 other languages are spoken, this bodes well for these children, who seem destined to get knowledge industry jobs or better.  Perhaps it even bodes well for me.  Given my seeming inability to learn the local language of Kannada, which reigns among most people in the city and state where I live, perhaps I will do better when I start Kannada classes tomorrow, thanks to the inspiration provided by the students of Shukla Bose.  I also was inspired by Ms. Bose's lack of obsession over scale, and her focus on quality.  Our relatively small company is in an industry (legal outsourcing) that seems to dwell too much on size, or "employee strength," a misnomer that suggests strength comes from numbers rather than skills and enthusiasm.

SHEKHAR KAPUR – FILM DIRECTOR

Acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth) promptly tore up his speech and dropped the pieces on the stage, announcing that “now, I'm in absolute panic.” He says it's a symbolic gesture he performs all the time while directing movies.  As the TED Blog recounts, “He allows himself to go into chaos, hoping that some truth will come out of it. The first thing he learned about storytelling is to panic, because that is the only way to get rid of your mind. Out of the emptiness, comes a moment of creativity.”

SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV -- MYSTIC

 

Given the large number of phony sadhus (fake Indian mystics), I instinctively was skeptical about this Mysore-born guru with his flowing robes and long white beard.  I also felt sorry for him, since TED repeatedly misspelled his name as Sadguru, inadvertently suggesting that he suffers from depression.  But he is anything but sad, and his humorous, down-to-earth, and deep talk won me over.  I especially was intrigued by his point about how the mind can create its own reality.  He told a very funny story, actually a joke, about a woman who had a dream while sleeping.  In the dream, a “real hunk of a man”  approached her in her bedroom, causing her to shake, “and not from fear.”  In the dream, she said to the man, “what are you going to do to me!?” He replied, “Hey lady, it's YOUR dream.”  For more about the talk, here is the entry from the TED Blog:

 

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev recounts his journey to arrive at the conclusion that life is not human-centric; rather, experience is created from within the individual.  He contends the body is just a piece of planet borrowed, and the boundaries of sensation determine who someone is and is not. He says people should embrace the separation of body and mind, and expand their boundaries of sensation to experience everyone as himself or herself. Empathy is natural to humans, so by including the experience of as many people as possible within our boundaries, we can conquer every pressing problem on the planet.

 

I also loved his message that the attitude of “I don’t know” is an engine for the acquisition of knowledge, such that we always should be very hesitant to say that we know.

ALWAR BALASUBRAMANIAM – ARTIST

The renowned sculptor and painter, Alwar Balasubramaniam, quite simply blew our minds, with his art, and with the impulses behind it.  One thing he has been exploring is the relationship between meaning and context.  In addition to showing slides of his arresting works, he told a hilarious joke about how different people would respond to the question of why a cow crosses the road, depending on their frame of reference.  Martin Luther King would say that he has a dream – of a day when cows are given respect, and do not have their motives questioned.  Moses would say that God told the cow:  “Thou shalt cross the road.”  Freud would say that by asking the question, you reveal a deep-seated insecurity about your sexuality, because you are not sure which side of the road you should be on.  The Buddha would say, and I would have to agree, that the very premise of the question, coming from a non-cow, denies your essential cow nature.  But here’s the official summary from the TED Blog:

Alwar Balasubramaniam, a sculptor, painter and printmaker, is fascinated by the transition from the present to the future, the traces that entities leave behind as they pass through time. Through art that is part performance, part sculpture, he explores the possibilities that emerge from these transitions and self-discoveries. He uses plaster and other materials to capture traces such as a fingerprint, the path of the sun through the sky, flames ... and the human face. But how real are these traces? His work highlights how subjective, context-driven all experience is. The mind creates meaning; meaning isn't independent of it. He shows artwork that is designed to decay over time -- a bust made of semi-solid material that melts, slowly losing value as time goes on. A later sculpture captures the inverse -- attempting to create "something from nothing" by growing more substance as time passes. His later works explore perception, the substance of unseen things such as electricity, magnetism, light.

The above is just a sampling of the many speakers and performers that made TEDIndia an experience none of us will ever forget.  If I had to sum up the conference in one phrase, I could not do better than the TED slogan, “ideas worth spreading.”  And again, those ideas were spread not only by the speakers, but also by the attendees.  In that spirit, I would like to conclude with my company’s own idea that we hope is worth spreading, and which we spread at the conference:

Imagine a world where high-quality legal services are affordable! Imagine deals getting done, because the attorneys don't kill them, with overlawyering and overcharging. Contemplate court cases and other disputes being resolved on their merits, rather than simply on the basis of whether one side cannot or will not pay the absurdly high costs of litigation. Visualize how much further the funds of social entrepreneurs and social investors could go, if exorbitant legal fees did not stand in the way. Think about legal professionals located in places that suit the interests of clients, rather than in the most expensive parts of the most expensive cities in the world. Consider the resultant savings when legal bills are based on services, not real estate. Envision deals and cases staffed by the most talented and enthusiastic lawyers available. Open your mind to the possibility that many of those lawyers are in India!  And consider the fact that this kind of outsourcing actually creates more legal jobs in the West, rather than cutting them.  Every time a deal is done, or a litigation is waged, because legal services are suddenly affordable, it means more work for the Western lawyers involved in supervision, editing, and/or appearing in court.  This is not only a dream.  It is happening every day, thanks to legal outsourcing in India.

Comments

[Sandy]

Brilliant summary, Russell. Glad to see you were impressed by the same things and people I was.

[Kim Wright]

I love how you shared your experience of TEDIndia in a way that I could climb into the frame and imagine what it might have been like to be there.

Imagine also, what if lawyers were peacemakers, problem-solvers and healers of conflicts?

[Tucker Bradford]

Awesome Post. I posted a much less ambitious report on my blog (http://www.forgeover.com/articles/2009/11/08/tedindia-recommendations). I'm still processing the event, and the week I spent traveling around.

I'm glad that you and I got so many opportunities to chat.

[Retro Jordan]

Excellent post. It makes me realize the energy of words and pictures. I learn a lot, thank you! Wish you make a further progress in the future.

[saurabh]

Brilliant article!. It would certainly be adding to the Indian Industry in a Big way.