By Jerry Johnson In what I’m sure will be one of the most prominent highlights of my entire life, I had the rare opportunity to meet the iconoclastic and charming James Randi—the atheist, skeptic, magician, and author. Long before the “four horsemen” of atheism made their debut, James Randi was [...]

Shoma Chaudhury in conversation with Shah Rukh Khan at THiNK 2012 session ‘The Solitude of a Superstar: The Public-Private Journey of a Dream Catcher’ With startling honesty, lyricism, genuine feeling and plenty of swearing, Shah Rukh Khan was the star turn on an exciting, at times explosive last day at THiNK. And that was [...]

Walking into a session on the dais for a discussion on corruption in India and possible solutions, I was expecting the usual cliché — politically correct statements that won’t be anything we don’t already know about. But this wasn’t the case. Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Jayaprakash Narayan presented a very structured [...]

As a CEO, one has to be prepared for any wild card event, one that rarely happens but affects your business in a major way. Prof Ian Lipkin of Colombia University started Day 3 of THiNK 2012 talking about just this. The risk of a viral pandemic is real and [...]

I was raised in a middle class home where the question of gender equality or the lack thereof did not arise. That I belong to a privileged group is not something I take lightly, at least not consciously. Growing up in a protected bubble however limited my definition of gender [...]

Day Two arrives and the excitement hasn’t even begun to wane. Pardon the cliché, but the sessions have started with a Bang, the Big Bang that is. David Christian is one of your everyday people who came up with a science and field of study. I came up with one [...]

David Christian raised the interesting question many parents will have: what problems and issues will our children be faced with? He started to elaborate that the Russian economy prior to Brezhnev would collapse if people would stop drinking vodka as its economy depended 40% on this, an interesting thought but [...]

Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote about the fickleness of youth, about not being serious when one is 17. However, at just two years of age, there is no doubt Tehelka’s THiNK conference in Goa takes itself seriously. If the name ‘Think’ isn’t enough, one look at the agenda for the first [...]

The last session, ‘Cinema, Wide Angle,’ on Day 1 of THiNK was an entertaining, sparky conversation between the filmmakers Reema Kagti, Anusha Rizvi and Zoya Akhtar. Moderated by NDTV journalist, Nidhi Razdan, the women quickly set about demolishing various shibboleths. “This woman filmmaker thing,” said Kagti, “why’re you making a [...]

Tehelka’s managing editor Shoma Chaudhury found herself outflanked during ‘The Development Knot’, a session featuring the businesswoman Zhang Mei and the economist and China expert Arvind Subramanian. Probing for chinks in the seemingly impregnable armour, Chaudhury asked if Chinese economic progress, having set such a blistering pace for decades, had hit [...]

In the post-lunch session of THiNK 2012, KT Ravindran, Prithviraj Chavan and David Gensler discussed The Fast-Burning Fuse: Can Indian Cities Be Saved From Themselves with Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury. Using examples from his tenure as chief minister, Chavan pointed out that since land economy has increasingly come to rely on [...]

Illegal construction, increased migration from the rural areas and the rise of slums. It might shock you to know that only 11 countries in the world have a population larger than the state of Maharashtra. The THiNK session, ‘The Fast-Burning Fuse: Can Indian Cities Be Saved?’ addressed several uncomfortable questions [...]