Background
Over the years in my hometown, I had met some wonderful people and been a part of some interesting conversations. The blind journalist turned English teacher, who made me tear up with his jovial and inspiring personality. The french teacher/musician, who travels the world learning traditional songs in various languages. The conversation with a cousin on a beach in Goa about the Indo-Aryan migration theory. And so many others. Being a regular subscriber of TED talks, I decided to try my hand at organizing a TEDx event for the challenge and for showcasing some ‘ideas worth spreading’. So I searched my poetry vault for theme ideas and applied for an event license.
Organizing a TEDx event
The real work began after obtaining the license in March 2018. After reading the TEDx rules and paying close attention to some great talks, it was evident that this was not going to be an easy task.
A team was assembled with the help of the literary club and some mechanical engineering students. My amazing curator and co-organizer, Aiswarya Sux, quickly rose to the challenge and was hard at work parsing the rules. While, Hari, another curator began the efforts for sourcing funding. We divided the volunteers into different groups and delegated various tasks. The social media team, the curation team, the logistics team, etc. This was still pretty early so our priorities were to find speakers and to train the curation team for assisting with scripting.
Thus began the scheduled viewing of TED talks and follow-up discussions. We would pick one or two talks per week and critically assess them based on quality, rhetorical devices, logical fallacies, delivery, etc. This was a fruitful exercise as the goal regarding quality was now set in everyone’s minds. This helped us to work with the speakers to ensure that they delivered their best possible speeches. Each speaker was assigned a volunteer as an assistant who liaised with the speaker, Aiswarya, and myself for planning, scripting, and dress rehearsal.
Breathtaking Disarray
There are certain rare moments in life when one can look back and see all those tiny irrelevant things for their mighty contributions. Moments of clarity such as this make sense out of chaotic occurrences.
Serendipity - A combination of events that are not individually beneficial, but occur together to produce a wonderful outcome.
However, most times all one sees is disarray. Moments when nothing makes sense. Maybe all one gets are moments such as this, maybe one must die never truly knowing, but the disarray will always be breathtaking.
Humanity, as a species, has sought to find order throughout our history on this planet and through collective learning, each generation has added towards understanding the complexity of the puzzle that we’ve been posed. As we dance and make our way up flights of discontinuous stairs into an uncertain future, the poetry in our journey is captured beautifully by the disarray.
The palette contains all the colors and the paint is still wet, the artist takes a pause to observe the beauty of their creation, the disarray of colors, of emotions, of life. The theme “Breathtaking Disarray” seeks to take a retrospective and introspective pause to appreciate the beauty in the absurd.
The event
The event was a tremendous success. We showcased some amazing talks like the Cosmic Perspective, Breaking the stencil, To think or not to think, and many more. At the event, we had a ‘flight’ theme for which we distributed boarding passes and the emcees led the volunteers in playing the role of flight attendants. My amazing co-organizer Aiswarya, an emcee for the event, even enacted the gestures for flight safety instructions. A very nervous flight captain (definitely not me :P) messed up his welcome announcement. In the end, like the theme adopted from my poetry, the event had pieces of me.