Transcript of Shekhar Kapur’s TED talk

Tada! I’ve just torn my notes to shreds. <audience gasps at this pointless act of bravado>

You may have forgotten me but I once made a film called Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is the greatest film ever made.

I made Elizabeth.

Maybe I shouldn’t have have torn up my notes. <audience gasps when they realise he shouldn’t have torn up his notes>

Panic! Art! Mythology — oh yes! I work at the intersection of art, myth and activism. (to self) Thank god I remembered my bio.

So yes, chaos. Out of chaos comes creativity. <audience gasps when they realise they are being treated to yet another Indian mystic>

Aha! There’s my clip. See, there. That’s Cate Blanchett. I discovered her.

In other words, if it weren’t for me, you’d never have seen Cate Blanchett on the screen.

Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett

I’m making this film called Paani. It’s so original, the idea came to me out of nowhere. I was driving and wondering why no one was arresting me because there was so much cocaine in my backseat  but then I saw this slum and I thought, Fuck, I should make a movie about water! Because no one’s ever done that before.

Did I tell you about Cate Blanchett?

All that red hair. Man, just thinking about her gives me a giant boner.

If I hadn’t torn my notes up, I couldn’t hidden my boner from you.

Right, where was I? Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett Yes, I made this film called Elizabeth. It’s all about myth. And panic is how I — oh look! They’re asking me to get off stage. Bye! I’m going to take my notes with me. Might be useful in future.

Shekhar Kapur (Photo: James Duncan Davidson)

Final word on the speakers

Acerbity aside, I was actually looking forward to Shekhar Kapur‘s talk. I was interested in all the talks, of course, but I was particularly looking forward to hear the creative people speak — even if didn’t care for their work.

At the same time I knew that many writers and filmmakers (and others of the same ilk) aren’t always articulate about what they do.  Shekhar Kapur, however, agreed to talk about his work and process, so he should’ve made an effort of some sort.

I’m sorry to say he was one of two speakers I really disliked. The rest had something going for them: good ideas, good presentations or both; at the very least they were sincere. Kapur wasn’t. Here’s his blog post about TED, if you feel like gagging.

The other speaker I didn’t care for was Srivatsa Krishna, an IAS officer with an extraordinarily narrow view of infrastructure. His presentations consisted of a number of slides showing various ambitious construction projects across the globe and of making facile jokes about how hard it is to get things done in the Indian government. From where I was sitting, you couldn’t even read the points on his slides, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anyway. It was all very forgettable.

Lastly, Abhay Deol, an Indian actor of some fame. He’s no Shahrukh Khan, but that’s because he’s very picky about the films he does. I didn’t love or hate his talk. It was, for the most part, a promotion of three of his recent films. He ended the marketing portion of his bit with the idea that Indian cinema has left many narratives unexplored. He offered some ideas as well, which I thought was quite generous, given the number of filmy people in the audience.

One thing, though: he didn’t at all come across as self-important, insincere or boastful. In fact he was rather nervous and spoke like a teenager. The man says ‘anyways.’ I thought it was endearing.

Also, what are the chances that the lead actor of one of two Indian films you saw this year suddenly decided to speak at an exclusive conference for which you just happened to get a free pass? Crazy world.

Oh, and I did say hi. Eventually. : P

TedINDIA

In retrospect the India-focus at TED was too strong. When TED is held in the UK or the US, does the conference become all about those countries and those countries’ contributions to the world? I don’t think so.

The running theme at TEDIndia, beginning with the first talk by Hans Rosling, seemed to be: ‘India will become the next superpower. Oh, and China too. But we’re in India and India is a democracy and we hate Commies, so we like India better.’ I’m sure many Indians were flattered, and I’m as patriotic as the next person, but it was disturbing to see that almost every speaker, especially the non-Indians, felt obligated to give us a big pat on the back.

Ironically enough it was Shashi Tharoor who put a stop to it. (I say ‘ironically’ because as India’s Minister for External Affairs he is generally expected to say only good things about India’s future, but also because I’ve never really liked him.) Why should we want or expect India or any other Asian country to become a superpower? Yes, these countries should progress and ensure a better standard of living for every citizen, but having superpower status will not accomplish anything. Superpower is an archaic concept and we should be moving away from it, rather than wanting it to go into someone else’s hands.

To extend his comments further, what makes anyone think that if, say, India took America’s position as superpower, that we wouldn’t misuse it? Are we so perfect that we’d ignore the chance to stomp all over other countries and make a mess of them?

Performances

I’m not sure if they always do this, but it was a good idea to have music and dance intersperse the talks. It woke people up. Yes, it was a sort of showcase of India and a whole lot of kitsch, but I wasn’t entirely opposed to it. Also, I think many of the non-Indians liked seeing something other than Bollywood representing India’s cultural sphere. Actually, I was too. My favourites were the Kalaripayattu dancers/martial artists and the Sidi Goma performance. I felt so ignorant when the Sidi Goma came out; I had no idea such a tribe existed in Gujarat!

Sidi Goma (Photo: James Duncan Davidson)

In retrospect

On my way back from Mysore I was thinking of how I would immediately go home and write about TED before I forgot everything. It didn’t happen because, besides being tired and everything, the minute I switched on my computer I found virtual sackloads of emails, FB messages, comments and tweets awaiting me.

I realise that that was a good thing. My immediate response would have been something like this: WOW THAT WAS SO AMAZING, EXCEPT FOR SHEKHAR KAPUR. Not terribly helpful, that.

It’s been almost a week and I see quite a few flaws.

According to the TED website, the conferences are about ‘ideas worth sharing.’ In a roundabout way, this implies that the ideas haven’t already made their way to the public, that they’re terribly new and just waiting for an audience. Unfortunately, most of the ideas were familiar. The technological innovations were familiar to techies, the social innovations were familiar to those interested in social aspects of the world, the environmental talks — it’s all been done before. When you are engaging with an audience that has ready access to internet, it’s a bit of a struggle to come up with things that utterly new and exciting. At the end of the day, I was excited by the form rather than the content of TED.

There was only one idea that I’d take away from the whole thing; it’s the idea that healthcare can use the McDonald’s model (google: Aravind and Ravilla Thulasiraj) and be massively successful. And frankly, that’s something I should’ve already been familiar with since I did a paper on development communication in college. I’m a bit shamed that I didn’t already know about Aravind Eyecare.

Secondly,  the talks were often repetitive. Especially the ones that had to do with education and teaching children in new ways. What was the point of that Galli Galli Sim Sim talk? Sesame Street has been around for donkey’s years and they’ve been teaching children through muppets for about as long. The fact that it was adapted to an Indian context three years ago makes it suddenly TED-worthy?

I am questioning the ‘highly curated’ aspect of TED.

On Monday, at the Book Festival, I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t met in a long time. I told him I’d been to TED and he said that he had attended some of the previous conferences. We discussed what it was like and what the purpose of all of it was, and we both agreed that there was a certain amount of self-indulgence involved in TED. And yes, I was part of it, and I enjoyed it, but that doesn’t mean we have to lose our critical eye.

A word about the Infosys campus

My god, what a strange place it is. It would take an entire blog post to explain its, well, charms, so I’m just going to point you to Amit Varma‘s blog (see: ‘The Sociological Research’). Seriously, no alcohol and no sex on that massive campus. And we Indians are supposed to be hospitable?!

Weird architecture, Stepfordian neatness, and Gandhian idealogy aside, it was a nice place to stay. No pollution. Lovely weather. And this is evil, but I loved not having to clean my own room.

People

So everyone says this: the best part about TED is not the talks (which are available online) but the people (read: the contacts).

I’ll be honest: my first impression of ‘TED people’ was not very good. A couple of non-Indians who took the same shuttle as me were being loud and annoying. It began when one of them, who had just gotten off the plane, began to complain about Indian officials trying to get a bribe out of him because he was carrying an expensive camera. I’ve asked around and it turns out that it’s just as likely that they were asking for a legitimate fee. There’s no way to tell what actually happened because he just went on about he was a foreigner and being taken advantage of, as if to say, Indians and Indian-looking people don’t get asked to pay the same kind of fee. So I asked him — politely — what made him think it happened only to foreigners. He mumbled something in reply and then said, ‘I’ve been to a lot of small countries and…’ I stopped him there. ‘India isn’t a small country,’ I said.

What he said was wrong on so many levels. Firstly, India is big both in size and pollution, and we’re making a global impact, as everyone at TED rightfully reminded us. Secondly, so what if it were a small country? Small in what way? Are we supposed to disparage small countries now?

After that I tried to sleep. Mr Natives-Were-Trying-To-Bribe me and this other guy kept talking about how rich they were, how many countries they’d been to, how much real estate they owned. It was like children in a playground, boasting about how many marbles each owned.

I was annoyed with TED, the phony people on the bus, the fact that my registration took so long, the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and I had two major rants before things began to lighten up.

At the welcome party I started meeting some really nice folk, people interested in who you were and what you were doing, and felt interested in them too, even if they were CEOs of companies you had never heard of. I started getting business cards — most of which are useless to me — but it was just great meeting people.

I know my friends are picking their jaws off their floors now. I’m not known to be sociable. I can be very cranky. I make excuses to get out of all kinds of social occasions. But I went out and I had fun. I realised that if there were a certain number of people who had come to TED largely to make contacts with other rich and influential people, there were also a large number of people, who, irrespective of how rich or not-rich they were, were interesting, genuine and a whole lot of fun.

TEDsters dancing at the grand party (Photo: James Duncan Davidson)

Among the large number of people I met someone who works with sustainable fabrics, an opera singer, relatives of famous writers, a designer of chai stalls, a wildlife conservationist, several investment bankers and CEOs, a guy who started his own bank, a conceptual artist, a Bollywood lyricist, a documentay filmmaker, several NGO workers, and um, like a million others.

Since I didn’t know anyone at TED, I ended up spending each session and each meal with someone different. It was only on the second and mostly the third day that I made friends. We’d keep running into each other and we’d have good conversations. Some of us travelled back together. Some of us met again for coffee, which was nice.

So this is a shoutout to my TED friends: Vinay, who had a room in the building opposite mine and who demanded that he get a one-on-one poetry reading, which, after much coaxing, he did; Ramzi, who is from Palestine, but lives in Dubai,  and speaks five hundred different languages including French; and Philipp, who was sweet enough to merit a spontaneous book-present from me (A Clockwork Orange; perfect for a nineteen-year-old, no?), and who I thought was American at first, but actually he’s German! Also, Datta, who is the first person I remember talking to at the party and who introduced me to a lot of people. He kinda bailed me out there, because I was lost. And Benita, who insisted on walking me to my room because she thought I would get lost. (Eventually I convinced her that I would be fine.) And Endo! I forgot Endo. Dammit — this will take forever.

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If you missed it, this is part 1 of the review.