Transcript

A visionary through pages | Raj Chengappa | TEDxYouth@JPIS

Hi, it's good to be back in school again. Uh, you know, for a long time I had on my briefcase. No one understands what a briefcase is anymore. We all have smartphones to tell us what to do. But those days we used to have a little case that we used to carry around. We put our notes and everything else. And I used to have a a slogan written on it which I had read somewhere but I don't know the source of that slogan. It said genius is the ability to make the complex into the simple. You know uh think about that a bit. Aren't we all living in a very very complex world? When I was your age, I used to cycle to school and then to college in college largely because uh I used to get pocket money uh and bus fair and I should try and save the bus fair so that I could uh have uh you know a snack or something while doing it and mix with my friends. But um so I cycled 15 kilometers every day and came back. I could repair my cycle. I could strip it. I could change the ball bearings. I could uh you know work the tube, repair it. Uh I could do everything with it. I was completely uh independent of any other outside help. But just take take a look at how things have changed now. We all drive cars or scooters. We have gadgets at home. the phone, the computer, um the refrigerator, the mixie. Can you think of repairing it? Maybe the cycle still, maybe to some extent the spark plug in your scooter, you can clean it, but these are all very, very complex gadgets. Very difficult to understand in the first place. Great utility, but you don't understand how they work, what they do. It's not important. But the larger point I'm making is that we are living in a very, very complex world. And if you look at the way we deal with this, the simplicity of our early lives was the complexity of modern world. The west had always looked at uh progress as something as speed. You know, you've heard the movie fast and furious. Everything had to be faster. You have faster computers, faster phones, um faster uh whatever, you know. uh but in India it was the opposite. We believed progress was stillness that you had to go into the inner world. As the west explored the outer world uh extended their mind and body uh you know by using cars or going by aircraft you can travel great distances. India search for the answers within. So instead of racing your mind and filling it with thoughts, we cleaned it all out and said, can we understand the world within? And so stillness and meditation was the key. There is a paradox in this speed versus stillness. And why is a journalist like me speaking about these things? What does it have to do with a hack like me who's too busy trying to to cope with daily life, report events, strife, interview important people, cover terror attacks, try and explain things because we need to understand the interconnectedness that we all currently live in. Just to give you an example and we used to ask this question in col when I was doing uh journalism, who gives a damn? I mean it's a very hard question. Who really cares what is important and why is it important? Pick the US presidency which everybody of you all must be reading. Why does it bother India? Who is going to be the next US president? Whether it's Hillary versus Trump, why do I get to read it? Or take a look at Syria. There's so much strife. Why would someone sitting in Jaipur here want to know what's happening there or come closer home? Why would uh you want to know what's happening between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu where they are having a huge battle over the sharing of river waters or closer home to Delhi where yesterday or day before you must have seen in the papers that a stalker had stabbed a woman who he was following for a while 20 times over and she died. Why should you read about these things? Why do you need to know apart from what you're studying in school or in college? Why do you need to know these events that are there? What is the connectedness between the between the events that happen and that that is happening to us? We all are very very well wired now. Uh if you look at it, I was just reading the other day. Uh there are more cell phones now existent than there are human beings. Just think about that. 7.2 2 billion cell phones out there. There are about 7.2 humans and probably the rate at which it's growing, we would have twice the number of cell phones than we have humans. So we have tremendous connectivity. We have our WhatsApp, we have our social media. I can send a message to any place in the world anytime to anyone. And if you take a look at the way technology has transformed things, the earliest uh way we communicated or made a record of our things, which is what I call the ancestry of journalism, was the caveman. He scribbled stuff on the walls of the cave and made a record of it. As it progressed further, maybe took 20,000 years or something like that if the caveman was there for 35,000 years. 5,000 years. And this is sounding like a history class, but you need to know that when they discovered paper for the first time, they were able to record their thoughts in a far easier and better medium than they ever had before than stone. The next great development surprisingly comes even later, 2,500 years ago, in a place in Germany in Gutenberg, they invent the printing press. With that they able to then produce first the Bible then books the textbooks that you now see the new you that you read now they all are printed of this invention u uh the printing press as you again it takes a little while and finally it is only in the 19th century that radio begins to come as another medium of communication. In another 20 30 years, television comes. What it then does is once the movies come for the first time, you're able to combine all the three forms of communication that we know which is the voice, the image and the text. But the real revolution comes during your time 1990 or so. The worldwide web comes. It gathers momentum. Never before has there been such dramatic changes in technology that have impacted our lives as is. And the worldwide web combines all these three elements of communication and you are then able to transmit not just receive information but transmit information to everybody else. Earlier it was a one-way traffic. I had a newspaper. You read it today. You can report the news as you see it. If you walk down the streets, for instance, you can if you see a fire, you can tweet it and everybody knows that there is a fire happening. Okay. So, does that mean that a journalist like me is going to become extinct like the dinosaurs? Am I going to lose my job? Because now instead of uh you know 5,000 20,000 reporters, the whole universe or the whole world is able to uh record events and transmit it immediately. I'm not worried about that because there is with this information explosion information chaos. How do you assimilate all these things? How do you understand the complexity? And that is why I'm coming back to the connectivity. You have to understand otherwise the human being is like watching a movie. You know, you can sit in a movie theater and cry and think it's a real event. What is the difference between a movie that you see and real life happening that's not directly affecting you? What is that difference? You know, you would cry as much as you would see uh if pictures of starvation in Africa. What is that difference? And the difference is this is that what I call the thread of life. There is a connectivity that we all have with each other. We have to discover that connectivity. Sure, we're connected technologically. Sure, we can WhatsApp each other. We can put stuff on Facebook that we could never do before. Okay? So people can you can talk to each other much much easier. But are we really connected? Do we really understand why we're reading about Trump and Hillary? Why does it bother us? And so you have to find that connectivity. I let's take a very simple example. Why does since I asked that question, why does this presidency affect the way we do things in India? Because if you get a madman as president of the United States, the entire world could blow up and we could go with it. Okay, that's the hard way of explaining it. But whatever US does begins to affect us considerably closer. Why is the caviar river and the dispute that it has with uh Rajasthan and I mean with Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and press someone in Rajasthan where I'm standing. The way they settle that is the way maybe Rajasthan will have to settle its dispute uh with for water with Hana which it has an ongoing dispute with it and that will also determine whether you would get your drinking water or not. So you have to explain the degrees of connectivity to make sense of the world around you. That's what a journalist does. So despite this huge information information explosion which you can't handle it you can't handle your own textbooks here in school you can't handle what's happening in office everything is crowding around how do I make sense of this world because the world is hitting me you need gatekeepers to information you need filters I I liken it since you just had lunch here to the way you would prepare a meal I could you know give you a whole lot of wheat or rice and say here, eat. This is information. That's what's happening. But what does the chef do? He makes it into a pasta. Someone told me you'll had pasta just now. Um, he makes it into a biryani or he does whatever it is, makes it palatable, makes it interesting, puts colors on it, adds a lot of other dishes in it, and then gives it to you and you have a wholesome meal. Somewhat like that, a journalist prepares all that information, cuts out all the nonsense and says, "Look, this is the meal you need. This is the information you need to understand to fulfill this hunger you have for information. If I give you this, this is what exactly you need." And therefore, journalists are master chefs. like the program that we're running, they're able to take out all the stuff that's happening there and give you fine dining and tell you why disparate events really affect our lives. And just to give you two examples, one is I used to cover environment. I went to the Paris climate change. Why would I want to know what's happening across the world and why are these agreements important? It is when you study ecology and you write about it. The environment around you, the flowers that you see, the trees that you do, the connectivity that I was talking to you about, the thread of life that I keep mentioning, that connect connectivity comes if you study the environment. a small frog in the western guts of India, south India, you kill it, you kill large numbers of it, they begin to have an impact on all of us because it's part of the food chain. That frog, there is a predator to it. That predator begins to die. There's a predator to that. Maybe the birds, whoever is dependent on the birds. And if the birds die, the other predator goes. or if it's say in in the forest uh the deer dies the tiger gets impacted all of us in that sense are interconnected it is very very important to understand that that a small action happening in Syria something happening in the US something happening in Delhi the woman that is being stalked and then stabbed affects you because it's your security so you have to have that connectivity and that the way we communicate That is the journalist skill. I'm going to end by an example that stayed with me for a very very long time. I was traveling to Agra nearby and in a train and I saw two people who were blind or visually handicapped as we call them now and two young pretty children who were not and they were visiting the Taj Mahal and I struck me when I went there that here was the most beautiful monument in the world and they couldn't see it instead they felt it around and so something happened here within me and on the way back uh I got into a conversation with them. They were traveling back to Delhi and um he told me that he was congenally blind blind from birth and she was blind the wife was blind after 4 years for some other disease that struck her. I got off at Delhi station and offered them a lift back. We were traveling by taxi then and uh as we went he said he told the taxi driver, "You're you've gone the wrong way." I looked at him and I said, "How do you know he's turning? You know, I I don't know that he's turning. I've got two great eyes and I I can't make out." He says, "No, I'm timing it. He should have crossed taken a turn after a minute. He has not done it, which means he's cheating us." And I got interested in his life. And I said, "Let me go and spend some time." And I got the greatest photographer, news photographer that we have, Ragurai, interested in it. And we both sat and listened to to the way Mangal say Balah, the blind man and his wife conducted their lives. And all the things he was more aware than I was. He said, "When birds flew freely, I knew there was open spaces. When I walked, I knew every bump. I could uh you know feel the turn because I there was a landmark or something that I could touch and I knew it. He was more sensitive, connected and aware than I was to nature. Then as we got chatting I asked him about a few questions and this the question that struck me the most was when I asked him uh you know we all think of uh you know uh being blind as dark. There was a movie called black. I asked him do you know what uh darkness is? Do you know what light is? So he says, "I don't know what darkness is." If you haven't seen light, you don't know what darkness is. We now have the light. We are lit up all across with all our cell phones. Do we really see the light? Think about it. Thank you very much.