Thoughts, ideas and opinions

There was pin-drop silence when Mona Eltahawy spoke of the so-called Arab Spring; how in November 2011, she was arrested in Cairo while covering renewed protests in Tahrir Square; and how she was surrounded by uniformed riot police who beat her with sticks before sexually assaulting her. “I speak about this a lot. Because I believe that when we don’t speak about sexual assault, the shame remains on the woman and I have no shame. The shame is not mine; the shame is theirs.” The silence was immediately broken by enthusiastic applause from the audience.

New York-based Eltahawy, an award-winning columnist, activist, and international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues, was one among the long list of speakers who took centre stage at the three-day THINK conference organised in Goa early last month.

Packing a punch to their speeches and interactions, a wide range of experts and renowned personalities from the fields of politics, literature, arts, science and humanities took part in the well-attended conference and regaled the audience with their views, opinions and often provocative thoughts.

It was indeed a special opportunity to listen to Fawzia Koofi whose life story was as fascinating as her present work in troubled Afghanistan. As the 19th girl child born to her father’s sixth wife, she was left out in the punishing winter of Afghanistan’s Badakshan province to die, but she survived. When she was three, her father was killed by the Mujahideen; her husband, imprisoned by the Taliban, died of tuberculosis. Fawzia herself has been targeted by the Taliban, but its many assassination attempts failed to weaken her fighting spirit. Today, Fawzia is in the forefront of many people’s struggles in her country and has risen to become the first woman Speaker of the Afghan Parliament.

Speaking in faultless English, the gutsy politician explained how people of Afghanistan have moved away from 1986 when Taliban came and ruled the country; how pursuing an Afghan agenda and not a foreign agenda is the need of the hour; how everyone needed to put the guns and weapons away; and how educating a woman is in fact educating a society as a whole.

With decades of research behind him, scientist and ‘movement chauvinist’ Daniel Wolpert, bust many myths about the structure and schemes of the brain when he revealed: “You may reason that we have brains to perceive the world or to think, but that’s completely wrong; we have a brain for one reason, and one reason only — and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements!”

Grassroots activists and environmentalists were given enough prominence: be it the 80-year old saint-scientist-activist G D Agarwal; Shekar Dattatri, conservationist, and award-winning wildlife filmmaker; Sunder Rajan, anti-nuclear protestor at Koodankulam; Sudha Bharadwaj, lawyer and campaigner for civil liberty; or Kamla Kaka, a tribal activist who spoke about the torture and killing of innocent villagers by paramilitary forces — all in the name of anti-Maoist operation.

And then, there was the ‘gentle giant’, George Schaller (known as one of the founding fathers of wildlife conservation) who in his very soft voice forcefully pleaded for a more eco-friendly and environmentally sustainable world. James Randi, the indefatigable 84-year old rationalist, atheist, magician and escape artist, kept the audience entertained with his tricks and exposés, even as he took on evangelists, godmen, and his pet peeve — homeopathy.

Equally entertaining was ‘The Taboo Buster’, Christopher Turner, author of Adventures in the Orgsmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America. The British writer and historian spoke of his book, a sex-centered biography of Wilhelm Reich, who studied psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud, and composed a theory of existence based on the orgasm. Reich’s books like The Function of the Orgasm (1927), and The Sexual Revolution (1936) caused scandal and were burned in Nazi Germany and New York State. Reich incidentally died, in 1957 — in prison.

Another engrossing session was titled ‘Chaining Godzilla: Does the Internet Need Control?’ “By its very architecture and design, it is impossible to censor the internet in a democracy,” argued Ben Hammersley, expert on media freedom; and whom Financial Times called the ‘guru of the digital age’. When asked how, for instance, rumours were spread on the internet to threaten young people from North East working in South India, he countered: “You cannot blame the internet for your failure to tackle social and political problems.”

One of the most highly anticipated sessions had Efraim Halevy (Israel) sharing stage with Kanwal Sibal (India) and speaking about the prospects of peace in war-torn Palestine. Halevy who looked more like a University professor than an Israeli intelligence expert and ex-Mossad chief, seemed to prefer dialogue as the only option for advancing long-term peace between Israel and Palestine.

With such a wide variety of speakers and topics, it did, on occasion, become a bit too heavy for ordinary mortals to grasp the intricacies of the talks. But, all things considered, the Think conference certainly succeeded in bringing together an exceptional group of highly entertaining, inspiring, and thought-provoking speakers, besides providing the audience a unique opportunity to listen, assimilate, ponder and…think!