‘We make great ideas available to millions of people’

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, an annual four-day residential conclave devoted to “ideas worth spreading”, which concluded in Mysore recently, was held for the first time in India. Chris Anderson, curator of TED, spoke to Sudeshna Chatterjee:

What has taken you so long to reach India?
Apart from one experimental event in Japan 15 years ago, TED has been for most of its history a closed event held annually in California. In 2001, its ownership transferred from its founder into my non-profit foundation (The Sapling Foundation) and we gradually started bringing in a more global roster of speakers. The big shift came in 2006 when we started releasing talks on the Web and discovered that there was a vast global audience excited by this type of content.

But isn’t the Rs 1 lakh entry fee exorbitant in a country like India?
Yes, a lakh is a lot, although it’s one-third the price we charge in California. No one is making a profit at TED. It’s run from a foundation and the fees don’t cover the large costs of putting on an event as ambitious as TED. This conference was subsidised by the foundation because we so badly wanted to come to India. Despite the high price it sold out. We also included 100 fellows, selected from 1,000 applicants, all of whose costs we covered, and a number of discounted educational and non-profit passes. We also streamed four of the sessions on the Web to anyone for free, and will be releasing all the best talks on our website, ted.com, in the coming months.

There will be numerous selforganised events held across India in the coming months under the programme we call TEDx. These will be publicised in due course, and people can find them on http://ted.com/tedx. Typically they will be one-day events held in various cities or universities and targeting a few hundred local knowledge-seekers.

Can you talk about some of the interesting ideas that came up at the Mysore conference?
Pranav Mistry is developing SixthSense, which is a wearable prototype that augments the physical world around us with digital information. Shaffi Mather’s corruption-busting business idea, where he proposes to set up anti-bribe BPOs across India and which will take a fee from the client is both brilliant and courageous. Shashi Tharoor’s views on soft power have been articulated before, but perhaps never in so compelling a way. The philosophy behind TED is ideas have a unique ability to shape the future. By making great ideas available to millions of people on ted.com, we’re helping to accelerate this process. There was the special moment when attendees responded to Sunitha Krishnan’s searing talk on her fight against sex trafficking by committing more than $100,000 in donations on the spot, and by promising jobs for the young women she is rehabilitating.