Ending on a sublime note with Astad Deboo, our day of THiNKING is over. We have witnessed some of the best feats the mind and heart offer. Tomorrow is the last day, and we will bring you all the action. Feel free to scroll through our live-blog if you’ve missed some of the day’s highlights – and don’t forget to follow us tomorrow for more discussions and more discoveries. THiNK
Epiphanies: Astad Deboo Dance Troupe. My Soliloquy with Kali
06:38 pm - For the last event of the day, master dancer Astad Deboo performs in front of our audience. No words can really describe what people feel when they witness Deboo’s genius. Read this profile of him.
Cinema, Wide Angle: Rishi, Ranbir & Karisma Kapoor. A Cinema Family Without Parallel in the World
06:30 pm – Rishi Kapoor is now out of control, giving his opinion (euphemism) on his son’s early career. He gets good laughs from the audience.
06:23 pm - How do they choose scripts? Mainly “instinct”, they say – their acting is praiseworthy, but they will probably not win the prize for original answers (!)
06:16 pm – Rishi Kapoor is Ranbir’s favourite actor, he says – and he really hated watching films in which his mother had romances with other actors. This so close association of work and family at such a scale is very original – and genuinely bizarre. “We never discuss work at home.”
06:11 pm – Between nourished laughs of the audience drawn by Rishi Kapoor’s gimmicks, we find out Ranbir Kapoor was really bad in school. To all the flunkers following us, you’re not Ranbir Kapoor so get back to work.
06:08 pm – Although he bears the weight of the whole family and the heritage of Raj Kapoor on his young soldiers, Ranbir Kapoor talks about how he cannot rest on the laurels of his family. “I had a regular childhood” – to be honest, we’re not really buying it. He gets a round of laughs when he says the generations of Kapoors are like the versions of the Iphones. The same phone sold again and again…just slimmer!
06:05 pm – Karisma Kapoor, who was the first Kapoor female megastar, went for a 6-year sabbatical before coming back to Bollywood a year ago. On stage, she busts the myth that the Kapoor family doesn’t want its female acting.
06:02 pm – Rishi Kapoor: “What I would say to my son (Ranbir), to my niece (Karisma) and to the younger generation is that they have it harder, because there are many more productions. Once should chose its projects well.
05:59 pm – Here is one of the songs from Rishi Kapoor’s hit movie Bobby (1973)
05:58 pm – Three members of the Kapoor family, a Bollywood powerhouse, come on to stage to discuss cinema and their family’s role in Bollywood. Rishi Kapoor: “Today is the 106th anniversary of my late grandfather Prithivraj Kapoor, the patriarch of our family, who started our “cinema dynasty” in 1928.”
Illusion, Delusion: James Randi. The Con-Catcher – Why a Magician Turned On Himself
05:55 pm – “The talks I have heard at THiNK this year have proven me that this country and you, the audience, are serious about knowing the truth. I am proud of you.” This witty and thought-provoking talk ends, THiNK bids farewell to “The Amazing Randi”!
05:53 pm – Homeopathy also gets a slap in the face. Randi tells the story of how he investigated homeopathy – and concluded that it was just a Placebo effect.
05:50 pm – A brilliant exposé in deception: Randi was wearing empty frames instead of glasses. Lesson learned: “One shouldn’t make assumptions and take things for granted when investigating pseudo-holy men, pseudo-psychics.”
05:48 pm – Randi praises Carl Sagan, saying how he influenced him: “He was a giant, an absolute giant.”
05:45 pm – James Randi comes up controversially when he starts ranting against “the godmen of India who have been swindling the Indian people for centuries”. He gets nourished applauses, and expresses his atheism in a country where spirituality and superstition are everywhere. He evokes Kovoor and his “charlatan practices”.
05:41 pm – How did Randi break Houdini’s record of staying under water? “I’m not revealing professional secrets”. Randi’s “mission” against hucksters have led him to a trial against Uri Geller (see video below). Randi declared: “When I die, I want to be cremated and I want my ashes to be blown in Uri Geller’s face.” (!)
05:38 pm – Randi is now exposing the “levitating match box” trick. He is showing it to the audience. He exposes it in the same way in this video.
05:35 pm – James Randi has been offering for the last 40 years $1 million to anybody who could prove his paranomal powers. They have all failed miserably. James Randi reminds it, and gets some good laughs from the audience while telling them about some of the “paranormal” talents he has debunked.
05:30 pm – As an introduction to “The Amazing Randi”, watch this video of how he debunked the pseudo-paranormal talents of Uri Geller and Peter Popoff.
05:27 pm – What will probably be one of the highlights of THiNK2012: James Randi, phenomenal magician but also debunker of psychic hucksters, takes the stage to discuss his approach to magic and to “paranormal”.
05:24 pm – While the last sessions of the day are being prepared, people on Twitter acknowledge how insightful and challengings the talks have been.
#think2012 has forced me to “think” & given me a lot of new perspectives & information. Causes such pain within. Maybe ignorance was better?
— atul s nath (@atuln) November 3, 2012
05:00 pm – As Kavita Seth comes back on stage to perform her second musical set and greet Ranbir Kapoor, we thought it would be a good idea to give you a sneak-peek into the backstage of THiNK2012. This is the Media Room, the web “war room” of THiNK!
Backstage Sneak-Peek: The Media Room
The Development Knot: Ulka Mahajan, Pradeep Prabhu, Mansa Ram, Dev Ram Kanhera. Battles for Earth, Water, Sky. And Life.
04:53 pm - Talking about the proposed Land Acquisition Act, Ulka Mahajan says that it treats land only as a commodity. “How can we afford to divert agricultural land for industrial purposes?” she asks, saying India would struggle to meet its food security targets.
04:47 pm - “I find it tremendously difficult to understand that 20 million tribals have been displaced,” says Pradeep Prabhu. Why don’t these communities be given the power of choice, he asks. “A community that does not know rape is better than yours, where a woman cannot walk on the roads,” he says. More than half of India are under Maoist influence, he says, and the primary reason is that the State has failed to restore people’s lands – which have been taken illegally – to the people. Prabhu asks law abiding citizens to stand up to a lawless state.
04:32 pm - Dubey asks Prabhu what land means to him. “I am a farmer. My land is my mother.” Development occurs only in India, not in Bharat, he says. Farming is an honest occupation, how can you take land away from a father, he asks.
Our speakers discuss land displacement at #THiNK2012
04:27 pm - Dev Ram Kanhera says that he isn’t against development, but he finds it strange that big corporates are given land at the expense of farmers who have tilled it for generations. Tehelka Hindi Editor Sanjay Dubey points out that they are compensated and asks whether they want more. “I am a simple farmer,” says Kanhera, “and I can’t learn a new trade now. Taking land affects generations, but the compensation never lasts a lifetime.”
04:20 pm – Shoma Chaudhury introduces a very pressing issue challenging Indian democracy. Land. Rural – often tribal – populations are being displaced by unilateral choices from the government, pressed by certain corporations. We are looking into this subject with Ulka Mahajan, activist in Maharashtra, Pradeep Prabhu, Dev Ram Kanhera.
The Healing Voice: Adonis & Sir VS Naipaul. What Poetry Can Do In A Time Of War
04:14 pm – The talk ends. A great and rare moment at THiNK2012.
04:12 pm – Adonis is asked the role of eros in his work. He decides to quote a Sufi mystic, Ibn-Al-Arabi: “Even when you will go to God, your style should be feminine. Without feminity, nobody will look at you.” Adonis adds: “Therefore, the feminity in my life is everything.”
04:09 pm – Adonis claims only two things will give you ready-made answers: religion and ideology. “I am against both religion and ideology”, he says. “Be a revolutionary, but don’t become like revolutionaries” demands Adonis.
04:06 pm – The political hardships of Adonis’ life are evoked. Adonis left Syria in 1956 after having been imprisoned, and settled in Beirut. Adonis explains that the problem of his country is that power passes in different hands, yet the roots of the problems remain the same.
04:00 pm – “I am not against religion as a personal belief. I am against it as a socio-political establishment. I always encourage Muslims to read the Qur’an as a cultural learning rather than a religious. This holy book embodies a large part of Arab culture. There are elements of Indian, Persian, Greek, Christian and Jewish cultures in the Qur’an.”
03:57 pm – Why did Adonis (his given name is Ali Ahmad Said Esber) choose this nom de plume? “It was a way to mark my appreciation for the multicultural nature of the world. Since that time, I consider that the person I am exist because of others. The other is part of me.”
03:54 pm – Adonis feels he is representing all of the people when he writes poetry. Tarun Tejpal now comes back to Adonis’ life, who recited a poem in front of the Syrian president at the age of 14 – and expressed the wish to go to school, while he was working on his father’s farm. Adonis explains there was no school in his village – he had never seen electricity, phones or a car before the age of 13. “When I recall what happened at that time, it seems to me a miracle! How can a farmer’s son recite a poem in front of the President, confident that the President would like the poem.”
03:49 pm - Tejpal aks Adonis if he believes that poetry has a power against obscurantisms of any kinds. Adonis: “Poetry can change the relations between words and things. Between human beings and words. And it can present a new face to the world.” He claims most of Arab culture comes from Arab poetry.
03:45 pm – Adonis continues by commenting the current events related to the revolution in his country. He assesses the crucial importance of freedom of expression and of thought in any truly democratic enterprise. He adds the necessity for a separation of the religious and political realms.
03:42 pm – Adonis speaks in Arabic, and expresses his objective to prove “what love can do in a time of war.” “Poetry is a vision, it serves everything and always establishes freedom for human beings and their rights.”
03:38 pm – Sir VS Naipaul: “You might not know Adonis that well, but he is a great man.” Watch him reciting one of his poems, Al-Waqt:
03:35 pm – VS Naipaul presents his relation to Adonis, how they met and how the Syrian poet offered him a window into “Arab culture”, which Naipaul admits not knowing much before. “I don’t know arabic. What I do know is the intellectual gift and growth of the man.” – “Adonis is a secular poet, a celebrator of the Mediterranean civilisation.”
03:32 pm – Tarun Tejpal introduces the Nobel laureate and the very serious contender, considered the greatest Arab poet alive. Tarun Tejpal reads Bullet, the English translation of a poem by Adonis. He will ask Adonis to read a poem in Arabic towards the end of the talk.
03:30 pm – In the next talk, the audience is blessed by an amazing surprise. The expected speaker, the great Syrian poet Adonis, will be accompanied by Nobel laureate Sir VS Naipaul, who had spoken to Tarun Tejpal last year at THiNK2011.
Voters Grill: Manish Tewari. Power and What We Make of It
03:29 pm - “Find the golden medium, the balance to better our democracy” – These are Manish Tewari’s closing comments. Shoma Chaudhury expresses hope in young politicians such as Tewari, and urges him to move beyond electoral politics.
03:24 pm – The justice system should be more accessible, says Tewari. Tewari criticises the culture of “allegation” against politicians, but Shoma Chaudhury asks him to comment on the culture of allegation of politicians – against grassroots movements in the civil society. For example, accusing those who protest in Koodankulam of being puppets of foreign powers. Tewari replies that “the common pattern of the agitations is that the agitators have stayed the same.” In the case of Koodankulam, he hides behind the decisions of the High Court and the Supreme Court. Shoma Chaudhury – and the audience – are disappointed by this reply.
03:20 pm – Manish Tewari is unable to name recent clear corruption cases. He claims that the criminal justice should work its course. “Standards in public life should be that if there are allegations against you, you should step aside, let justice do its course.”
03:17 pm – In 2006, Tewari wrote in Tehelka on how to counter communalism in Gujarat. The discussion veers towards the issue of corruption, a question plaguing the current government and the whole political class. Manish Tewari answers that laws must be adapted to effectively punish the culprits.
03:12 pm – Tewari explains he entered politics because of his personal life and his relationship to Punjab. His father was in fact killed by Sikh militants a few months before Operation Blue Star.
03:08 pm- Manish Tewari, Congress Minister for Information and Broadcasting, discusses with Shoma Chaudhury his experience of politics and the challenges of the Indian government.
The Taboo Buster: Erica Jong. Body Games for the Mind: Sex, Liberation and How She Freed a Generation
01:51 pm – The last part of the talk is about Jong’s literary work. She explains how she wanted to pervert the Ulyssean myth – “the woman waiting, the man having fun”
01:47 pm – “A Second Wave feminist said I was a bad sister because I wore makeup, high heels and lace underwear,” says Jong.
01:40 pm - The audience is rapt, so the session is extended by ten minutes. Meanwhile, here’s Erica and her daughter Molly talking about their completely different views on feminism. “My mom thinks I’m a prude,” Molly says.
01:34 pm - Jong next married Jonathan Fast, son of novelist Howard Fast, and one night of lovemaking was so sublime, she says, that she immediately knew she was pregnant. But motherhood and her flourishing career created fissures. ”We were hippies and lived in California, and were supposed to be in an open marriage,” she says. But territoriality came in, she says, and they split. “After that, I had many guys,” she says. “One for sex, one who looked good in a tux, one I could talk to, one who was gay. I was never going to get married again.” But then she met Kenneth David Roberts, a lawyer who looked good, spouted Shakespeare and Marlowe by the yards, was an affluent Jewish boy with a sailboat.
01:24 pm - The discussion inevitably turns to the many men in Jong’s life. The feminist icon says her current – and fourth – husband of 23 years is a man her parents would have liked. Her first, her high school sweetheart, turned out to be a schizophrenic and tried to kill himself and her. Her second, Allan Jong, was “an indefatigable fuck,” she says. “Yet you left him,” says Shoma, “so clearly fucks aren’t everything.” The problem, she says, was that he never talked.
01:14 pm - From fusion to feminism, as Erica Jong takes the stage next in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury. She talks about her mother, a woman born one generation after the suffragettes, who instilled feminism in her. However, her mother’s intimidating personality meant that their relationship was ambivalent, she says.
01:04 pm - China has plans to commercially generate electricity through fusion by 2030, Cowley says. “In Europe, we don’t have the cash or the political will,” he says, “so we are looking at generation by 2040.” He says that they have found a way to make the cost comparable to wind or fission energy. “It’s really hard to do, but it’s worth doing.”
10:50 am - This talk was impressive, as George Schaller mesmerized the audience with his poised and determined demeanor. An example for everyone.
10:41 am - Schaller started studying animals in national parks, he says, but then realised that those animals were already protected. So he went all over the world, to places like Iran and Pakistan, and asked governments how he could help.
10:38 am - “There are no victories in conservation. If you love something, you need to nurture it for ever,” says Schaller when asked about China’s success over the last 10 years in protecting the giant panda.
10:37 am - “I am a naturalist. I love watching animals and writing their biographies. But you can’t study something without worrying about its future,” says Schaller.
10:34 am - “India has a moral responsibility to protect the tiger,” says Schaller. He says we need core areas for tigers as well as wildlife corridors so that they can move between habitats.
10:30 am - Talking about how gorillas are protected in the Congo, Schaller says tourism revenue is shared with locals, which gives them a stake in saving the animals. India has a unique conservation challenge, he says, as we have 59,000 births a day. “That’s a new city every day,” he says.
10:27 am - The human species is the only species that is actively destroying its world, says Schaller, who once called us evolution’s great mistake.
10:25 am - The pressures of government means that Praful Patel – who was supposed to speak next – has still not landed in Goa, so we move to to a session with environmentalist George Schaller in conversation with Tarun Tejpal. A pioneer of conservationism, it was Schaller’s work that convinced Indira Gandhi that the tiger needed to be saved, and his years studying gorillas changed the perception that they were savage beasts.
The Personal is Political: Mona Eltahawy. Egypt, Islam and the Raw Note in the Freedom Song
10:15 am - “I broke the law, and I don’t care. Because racism and bigotry are wrong,” says Eltahawy of her subway vandalism.
10:13 am - “In Saudi Arabia, you either lose your mind or become a feminist,” says Eltahawy, who lived there for a while. She made headlines with this controversial article in Foreign Policy on misogyny in the Arab world.
10:07 am - Mubarak established a police-military-state, says Eltahawy, but could not close down the mosques. That was why the Muslim Brotherhood was the primary opposition. “In a way I am happy that the Muslim Brotherhood came into power, because I want them to own this mess,” she says. The Salafists, she says, have called Morsi a sellout because of his centrist positioning, which could lead to him ceding the social right to them.
10:02 am - Eltahawy says she is an obsessive Tweeter. Here’s a video of her speaking at Wired about how Twitter saved her life.
10:00 am - Eltahawy talks about her sexual assault on Tahrir Square. She says she openly talks about it, “because I feel that if you do not speak about sexual assault, the shame remains with the woman, and the shame is their, not mine.”
09:56 am - “Five successive US Presidents supported our tyrant,” says Eltahawy, because “the world never thought that the Arab people could stand up for our freedoms.”
09:53 am - Eltahawy calls herself a ‘fundamental optimist’, but felt that the Arab Spring could never be successful unless women stood up. She is telling harrowing tales of women being attacked by both the military junta and the Salafists.
09:49 am - Next up is Egyptian journalist and activist Mona Eltahawy, who last made headlines for defacing anti-Islam posters in the New York subway. It led to a shrill debate on free speech. Here’s her article defending her actions.
“I wanted to use my profile as a commentator to test “protected speech”: if hate speech is protected, is my protest at it also protected? And if not, why not? What if the choice on the ad were reversed: “Choose Jihad. Defeat Israel.” What if the ad vilified African Americans, or Jews, or any other group for which public denigration is less permissible?Banning hate speech doesn’t end racism or antisemitism. Social pressure does that. It becomes socially unacceptable. To get to that level of unacceptability, we must stand up to hate-mongers like Geller. Clearly, not enough of us are doing so if hate crimes against Muslims in the US tripled in 2010-2011.”
Maps of Time: David Christian. The Universe in Haiku: From the Big Bang to Today
09:44 am - Christian talks about the power of teaching Big History in schools, saying that academically weak students did much better once they could contextualise what they were learning. He says he’ll try to introduce it in Indian schools, getting a round of applause.
09:37 am - The reasons we humans thrived, Christian says, are the facts that we had the body to jump through trees and that we possess collective learning. That is, we can share ideas and learn from each other. That’s the precise idea behind THiNK, no?
09:34 am - Christian says that if that asteroid hadn’t hit the Earth 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs would still be here and humans would never have existed. Clearly, this man has never watched The Flinstones.
09:32 am - Christian is taking the audience through the history of the Earth, starting from the Big Bang. To know more about the Big History Project, watch this video.
09:28 am - Christian is talking about his four core ideas:
- Increasing Complexity: The idea that we always move from basic to more complex systems
- Goldilocks Conditions: Has more to do with planets than porridge, but the principle remains the same. For life to occur, conditions must be just right
- Emergence: The concept of gradual changes
- Threshholds: Landmarks in the march of time
09:20 am - A former Russian history professor, Christian says he didn’t want to tell the history of one tribe, but the entire world. This involved many disciplines, so he asked geologists and astronomers to lecture about their entire subject in 45 minutes. I’d hate to miss that class.
09:17 am - David Christian is the man behind Big History, the history of the universe all the way back from the Big Bang. Here’s him telling the history of our world in 18 minutes at TED.
09:14 am - The doors have been opened and the crowd has rushed in. On Twitter, Buridan’s Ass is delighted at getting a good seat.
https://twitter.com/chau_s/status/264569117594501120
09:08 am - Here’s Tehelka Editor Tarun Tejpal outlining his vision for THiNK.
09:03 am - Hello and welcome to another full day of cranial calisthenics at THiNK2012. Yesterday was enthralling, with speakers from the diverse fields of prime numbers and Palestine. Today promises even more, with Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, social network expert Sherry Turkle, feminist author Erica Jong, and the Bollywood trio of Rishi, Ranbir and Karisma Kapoor. Excited? So are we.
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