The Idea Caravan

I have always enjoyed TED Talks. They are inspiring; open up your thought process and give you another perspective. They are very interesting and they cover an antire gamut of social, technological and live issues. 

Forever imprinted on my mind will be the TED Talks by Joe Smith on how the world can literally halve its paper towel consumption by using only one paper towel after washing hands, rather than using two AND the TED Talk by Pranav Mistry. I have seen many other TED Talks over the years but somehow these two have left an indelible print on my gray matter.

Franklin Templeton Investments partnered the TEDxGateway Mumbai in December 2012 and Indiblogger created a contest of sorts out of it by encouraging people to blog about them. An excellent thought and initiative I would say to take the TED Talks to a wider audience and add more perspective to it. I went through a couple of the talks from Dec 2012 and here are my quick comments on a couple of them. 

Besides reading what I have written, I would strongly suggest you head to http://www.ftideacaravan.com/ where you will find all the TED Talk videos. 

View them. They are GOOD.

TED Talk by Mittal Patel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8cZ2iJARPM

Mittal's talk on the ‘invisible’ nomadic tribes and de-notified tribes was shocking. Their only record with government bodies is with the Police. The women are pushed to prostitution with the men playing pimp. Scary! Shocking! Even more shocking was about wrong people stuffed into jail on account of mistaken identity in the absence of their identity card which could have proven their real identity. Her organization - Vicharata Samuday Samarthan Manch (VSSM - http://vssmindia.org) – is an attempt at uplifting the life of these uncared forgotten people.  

TED Talk by Ruma Roka 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ai3XTLyGboQ


Ruma's talk on the deaf kids touched the heart and at the same time gave us a very different perspective. Her exploration of the meaning and purpose of language was interesting. Her attempt to connect to employers and identify jobs that the deaf people could undertake and designing a study curriculum specifically for it is commendable. An excellent success story of having 25 people employed into mainstream organizations !! 

Both women have talked about social issues and have also effectively displayed how a single person can actually make a difference. As more people would join their efforts, the effects will be manifold. Drop by Drop ... certainly fills the Pot. 

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