Day 2: JoshTalks New Delhi. #LEAP2016

Day 1 Josh Talks : What happened previously in JoshTalks .

With Day 1 coming to a close the previous day, it was time for day 2 to start and I was running against time as I knew that I couldn’t attend the full session with a flight to catch up later in the day. So here’s what happened on day two -

Ishita Katyal- Size can deceive. She is a tiny 11-year-old girl, a bestseller to boot and thoughts at such a mature level that grown-ups can run for cover. She thinks on topics equal to her age but effects and after-effects so much which the elder people today ponder on. Be it about war, the hike in school fees, environment etc. you name any issue people face today and she has already thought of all that because she realises that the effect of these things today would be having a very adverse effect in the coming future.

                         

Angam Parashar- What he presented was a very interesting topic. He looked to replace human journalism with machines. In an era of everything being sold as breaking news, I think that machines with artificial intelligence could be programmed to provide us with information that is relevant in today’s media and not everything being served as “happening”. They can analyse all daytime in one go, thereby saving a lot of time. Another advantage of this would be in war torn areas where these machines can go and report for all without the fear of loss of human life. Many war journalists lose their lives every year in our war areas across the globe will stop. Maybe these machines could be the UAVs of reportage in the time to come.

Anshukika Dubey- She heads Wishberry, a platform for crowdfunding. It’s a very novel idea and something really different, you put up your idea or anything you are interested in and wishberry would put it up online for crowdfunding, and you can see your dream take wings as a lot of ideas in India don’t have the required money with them to finalise them on their own, and that’s where crowdfunding comes in. There is no limit on the amount you wish to contribute. The movie titled “ Goonga Pahalwan” - about a dumb wrestler who won few medals and which won an award at a film festival was totally crowd funded. Try this website - who knows, you might get a project you would love.

Thats Indie on stage

Sheelika Ravishankar – Team Indus. The only team from India who plans to put the first robot on the moon. The robot “Indi” is a 65 – 70 million robot who actually came onstage. Tremendous is computed ting in a global competition to achieve what others term as extremely difficult, considering that the team behind it has no aerospace background and no deep pockets. It’s working with some 100 active and retired scientists of ISRO. Like America was the first country to put its live on the moon, team Indus plans to be the first team to put the Indian tricolour on the moon by a robot.

Tanmay Ghosh- A common man environmentalist. 23% of the land protected in the name of religion, 6% is with the rainforests. We are struggling when it comes to the environment. Tanmay has worked for years with villagers planting trees, vegetation and changing the whole biodiversity of the place. In approximately 8 years, the green cover of the area has enhanced and now it is home to various flowers, variety of birds and animals which were not there previously.

A Hacking session in progress

Saket Modi- I would call a session purely as a hacking session. He’s a hacker who works with various government agencies when it comes to security firewalls and all that technical stuff. There is not much to write about him and his session because what we displayed was pure pickle when he actually hacked a mobile phone of one of the audience. He set up a private Wi-Fi network on his computer, asked all of us to connect to it and then took the phone of one of the audience. God knows what he did on the screen, he handed over the phone just after 5 seconds and then his magic started working. What we could see was a hacker interface and the various codes running. After 2-3 minutes the whole contacts, messages of that person were displayed on the screen.

Anurag Kashyap- He needs no introduction in any sense. His was probably the longest session of the whole 2 day event. He had come to Bombay with just books and clothes. He started reading for people at Prithvi Theatre, taking no money or credit. Even worked as a waiter at a cafe for free near Prithvi Theatre so that he could network with people. Started writing episodes for daily soaps in 1993. With a writing capacity of hundred pages a day, he became the go to man for content directors. Getting no credit and virtually no money then , he wrote Shanti, Swabhimaan back then. Took a decision to write Satya when he was being offered a lump sum amount to write serial for Mahesh Bhatt. Using natural lighting, long lenses to shoot realistic scenes in movies because the budget was too tight. Travelling luxury buses at night and shooting in the day so that the costs could be minimised. These are just a few examples and that’s how Black Friday, Paanch, GOW, Gulaal etc. got made. When some of his most ambitious movies failed and he suffered a setback, he had to go back to the drawing board again and start from scratch. Be it releasing movies, marketing them abroad, he has done it all and he has to take some really different and difficult decisions along the way.

Ritu Karidhal- ISRO scientist and a member of the Mangalayan team. She presented us the history, preparations, it took for India to put a satellite in the Mars orbit in the very first attempt and that too cost effectively. The climax scene in the movie gravity is much, much more than what India actually incurred on the whole Mars mission. For probably the first time in my life, I got to know the challenges a launch team faces everytime a satellite is put into orbit. It’s a race against time and contingencies. For e.g. communication is something which needs to be thought of in advance and do the programming accordingly. Instructions being fed into the on-board systems, fuel systems, response time from space to Earth and back…. All this is mindnumbing and a huge achievement for a country to get success in the very first try.

Devendra Jhajharia- Somebody whom I had been dying to hear after Anurag Kashyap for the past two days. He was the last speaker for me as I had a flight to catch so I could listen very few things about his story. Having lost one arm at the age of 8 in a freak accident, he did not lose heart and competed in Paralympics defying even age. He was the flag bearer, plus he has already won 3 Asian games gold medal + silver medal. In this Paralympics he broke his own record to achieve distance of 65.9 m to set up a javelin throw world record. Off the record, I had read somewhere that during the Paralympics his 6 year-old daughter had made him promise that if she came 1st in her class, he would also have to do the same. She kept her promise and he did his… with a 65.9.

In the 2 days, I heard more than a dozen speakers each with a very different story that we would not normally know. Inspired or not, but I would surely say that all the stories in some way or the other left us in awe. Some of the known names got the biggest applauses and some of the awe stuck stories the biggest standing ovations I have ever seen in events when the whole place stood up and applauded with such high that it almost became deafening at one point.

That was Joshtalks for me.