Even for India, though, the blackout that began in the early hours of Monday was extraordinary. Nearly 360 million people—more than the population of the U.S. and Canada combined—lost power across seven states in northern India when excessive demand and a shortfall in hydro power overwhelmed the electricity grid. The worst blackout in a decade started at 2:32 in the morning, leaving people sweltering in their homes and stopping service on trains and subways in Delhi..... Slightly more than 12 hours later, power resumed in the capital...... The less-than-normal rainfall has put strains on India’s hydroelectric power supply, which accounts for 19 percent of the country’s 205 gigawatt generation capacity ..... The blackout “is symbolic of the infrastructure bottlenecks of the country” ...... The government wants to spend $400 billion over the next five years on power-sector investment, adding 76 gigawatts of capacity by 2017. That’s on top of the 85 gigawatts of power India has added in the past 10 years.
Of all the blog posts I have done at this blog, this has got to be my favorite: My Web Diagram.
I keep thinking in terms of the red circle.
What after the infrastructure has been built? Then what? That has implications. When people in tech talk about disruptive, it is about shifts in the way the technology operates. Digital disrupts the music scene, for example. Disruptions can be to business processes.
But the web is not one technology, just like white is not one people, Indian is not one people. There are many peoples. Africa is not one country.
During the recent Blogger outage, a whole bunch of my blog posts got lost. And then all of them came back except this one at my Barackface blog. Since it had already been cross published at Technorati, I still had a copy.
The military action in Libya has absolutely been the right move. And a limited military action in Syria might be called for soon enough, something that is a week max. But military action is not an option when the tide of democracy finally hits Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and China.
The Atlantic: The Coming Battle for Africa's Internet: Seneweb.com ... the unofficial homepage of the nation. .... the Huffington Post of Senegal -- except with far less in the way of competition. Deeply influential in Senegalese media and politics, it's where obscure reports of government waywardness go viral. On a happening day, the site fetches 200,000 unique visits and 1.3 million hits -- astounding numbers in a nation of 13 million, less than a million of whom can even get online. ....... That traffic has traditionally come not from inside Senegal but from all the motley places where West Africans travel for work -- such as Romania ..... nearly every country in the neighborhood has its Seneweb: Ghanaweb is probably the most influential, followed by Côte d'Ivoire's Abidjan.net. ...... "But now, the majority of visitors are in Senegal. The internet has taken off here." ...... as internet access becomes cheaper and more widespread ....... Less than ten percent of Africa's population has internet access ..... expects that number to grow by half every year "for the foreseeable future." ..... 100,000 miles of broadband wiring criss-crossing the world's second-largest continent like the 21st century version of a transcontinental railway. The connections start with undersea cables and extend onshore towards 3G towers within reception range of the continent's growing middle class. ......... 300 million people, each earning between $2,000 and $5,000 yearly -- not always enough to keep a router in the living room lit, but certainly enough to pay off a BlackBerry bill. The service they enjoy, smoother than its American equivalent, runs off towers that are newer and more adaptable to data transfers, which is rendering Africa's telecom transition -- from a continent of voice phones to one of pocket PCs -- more scalable than expected. ....... happening faster and faster than anybody could have imagined ..... every ten percent of a country's population that winds up online powers a percentage point and a half of yearly economic growth ...... the World Bank's offices in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which typically focus on building roads or power plants, have allocated $57 million to support a $300 million project to build a broadband cable reaching out to sea. ..... Currently, most internet access in Sierra Leone and Liberia is only by satellite, which restricts it to those who are both extremely rich and extremely patient. ....... "The impact of mobile phones clearly demonstrates that internet is something that can be transformative for the bulk of the population." ...... the converse is true as well: Africa's population could also be transformative for the internet. ...... Google offers a Craigslist-style site where Africans can shop used goods -- sheep, pool tables, balafons (a xylophone-like West African instrument) ...... Last year, Google unfurled Baraza, a question-and-answer forum for Africans ..... a phone-based bookkeeping service for shopkeepers, for example, which could do much in a part of the world where every salesman records his turnover in a notebook. He also wants to add a Blogger service to Seneweb and to sidestep Google Ads by soliciting African companies to buy banners on his site. ...... "You look at Africa, Brazil, China, India, and right there you have almost four billion of the world's consumers," Herlihy says. "They're only going to be happy using products designed for Americans for so long."
This is so exciting. This is when I was pursuing my IC vision a few years ago. It is happening, and fast. Frees up people like me to go tackle the next big thing: microfinance. We are for profit, high tech Kiva that will do the last mile under its own brand name.
Image via WikipediaOf all the technologies that I see that can be put to use for microfinance - and I see a lot - the one that most stands out is mobile phone banking, the m-Pesa kind like has spread like wildfire across Kenya.
It is because the last mile is the most complex in the business. And mobile phone banking comes across as this gold standard that can help cut through the thick of all sorts of social, cultural, and bureaucratic issues. This is a case of simple technology beating human flailings to the dust.
Mobile phone banking reduces banking to simple transactions. You do it one simple transaction at a time. And the chips fall in place just fine. Mobile phone banking is like a machete with which you cut through the green thicks as you wade through a tropical forest.
The mobile phone is in a unique position to deliver all sorts of other goodies that will help transform the business. This decade belongs to the mobile phone.
Image via WikipediaMy startup is not even officially launched yet, and we already just went through a major reorganization. Some early people parted ways. I am blaming it on too much partying. A lot of early Facebook people left saying it is not easy to have a friend for boss.
I am now in touch with a major social media talent.
"The best people you can recruit are already working for someone else."
- Sam Walton
I started out with India thoughts. I got nudged towards Latin America. You have to start out in a middle income country first was the suggestion. I said okay. But now, with the reorganization, I got a clean slate all over again. And I find myself thinking Kenya.
Image via WikipediaBrazil is supposed to be one of the eternal powerhouses of soccer. Or so I thought. This year a lot of the old powers were gone by the wayside. Italy was nowhere in the picture. England was out fast. France, did they even qualify? This year saw a new world order in soccer.
Twitter should have had more users than Facebook, (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter) but that is not what we see. It is Twitter's fault. It is not like Twitter has ever had problems raising money. If you don't have problems raising money, you don't have problems hiring the engineers you need. Twitter was bogged down focusing on scaling: I always thought that was a bogus argument. Show me the Facebook fail whale.
I have thought long and hard about it, and I think the reason Twitter has not scaled like it should have is because Jack Dorsey went ahead and became Chairperson. What was one person's invention got handed over to a committee to grow and scale. They say in Africa it takes a village to raise a child. Maybe it does. But I don't think that applied to Twitter. It is a DNA thing. The founder CEO will make big bets. People who took over will not dare to. The other founders spent too much time basking in the Twitter glory of 2009.
Facebook should have grown like the big screen web. Twitter should have grown like mobile phones have grown all across the planet. Twitter has largely missed the boat. Why? You gotta ask.
FourSquare has competition, Twitter does not have competition. I don't feel like Twitter has been able to cash on that advantage.
Twitter needed to try and come pre-loaded on mobile phones. Twitter needed to make sense to people who don't speak English. Twitter needed to make sense to people who are not literate. From the Twitter that I know and experience and get headaches over to that simplicity is a light year.
I know a Harvard graduate who is confounded by the hashtag. It is not her fault. It is Twitter's fault.
New York Times: I.B.M.: Africa Is the Next Growth Frontier: I.B.M. will supply the computing technology and services for an upgraded cellphone network across 16 nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Its customer is India’s largest cellphone operator, Bharti Airtel, which paid $9 billion a few months ago for most of the African assets of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, or Zain..... The deal takes the broad partnership between Bharti and I.B.M., begun in 2004, beyond India. ..... in the last five years I.B.M. has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices and foster technology training programs — and it plans to expand aggressively in the region..... the next major emerging growth market — Africa .... I.B.M. is targeting the linchpin industries of economies including telecommunications, banking, transportation, health care and energy...... only 23 percent of Africans have access to banking services, but already 8 million Africans use their cellphones for payments.
The for profit route is the route to go. The for profit route is the best way to do good for about 90% of the people out there, be it Africa, China or India. Or America. Most Americans take care of their families with jobs they hold with privately held companies.
In The News
New York Times: Oracle Profit Rises 20%, Higher Than Forecast: for a quarter that closed at the end of August, traditionally one of the slowest selling periods..... Safra A. Catz, a president of Oracle .... “I don’t believe there is any other company in the industry better positioned than Oracle,” Mr. Hurd said. ..... The legal squabble underscores the changing relationships taking place as the world’s largest technology companies begin to step on each other’s toes. .... Never one to back down from a confrontation, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, threatened that H.P.’s lawsuit against Mr. Hurd could wreck the companies’ relationship. ..... Oracle continues to follow a multiyear strategy of acquiring business software makers large and small. The company hopes to become a one-stop shop of sorts .... tends to purchase companies with loyal customers who pay regular maintenance fees for upgrades and other services ... Oracle posted about $1 billion in hardware sales as well ..... Ellison vowed to unveil a host of new products at Oracle’s event next week, including systems that create tight links between hardware and software. Google Ventures Hires an Entrepreneur-in-Residence: the man behind Google Voice ..... Google bought GrandCentral for a reported $45 million in 2007 and since then, Mr. Walker has been the product manager for real-time communications at Google. ..... Entrepreneur-in-residence is one of those only-in-Silicon-Valley jobs. Smart people get paid to sit around and think about new ideas, and investors get the chance to join an entrepreneur early in a new project, betting that lightning will strike twice. ..... “This business that we’re in as V.C.s is a social business, more about people than companies or products.” ..... the idea is that Google will eventually fund Mr. Walker’s next start-up..... there are still lot of industries like that out there.”
TechCrunch: Yahoo’s Internal Three Year Plan: 1 Billion Users And $10 Billion In Revenue: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.... short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen ... what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision How Small Countries Out-perform: A Guide (Spoiler: It’s a lot like Startups): By 2050 the United States will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the seven largest economies in the world. Our new peers... will be China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. .... Israel and Singapore. These are two countries that had little in terms of natural resources and have far out-performed their larger neighbors ..... tiny Singapore has just 2% of the population of its giant neighbor Indonesia but its GDP is 35% of Indonesia’s ..... a culture of entrepreneurship ..... Israel .. indirectly benefited from its instability, in that most of the innovation in the late 1990s spun out of the army. ...... The President of Iceland Olafur Regnar Grimsson, who was on the panel, said his size has been an advantage in doing deals with the global giants because it’s not a threat and there are no political dustups. ...... One huge international giant, like Nokia in Finland, can have a disproportionate effect on the economy as it swings up and down with the market ..... What works best isn’t erecting some incubator but favorable tax policy, labor laws that allow for rapid company formation and failure and incentives for foreign investors. ..... Singapore’s GDP was down 8% last year but is up 18% in the most recent quarter. Music Lovers, Be Prepared To Fall In Love Instantly – Meet The New Shuffler:Shuffler is excellent for music discovery Social Payment Startup Venmo Raised $1.2 Million And Has A New iPhone App (TCTV): closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz, (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO)...... Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. ..... if it grows, businesses could start accepting Venmo payments simply by opening an account. .... If it can start collecting enough public data about what people are buying, that data could be very valuable to brands and businesses.
Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released: All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).... will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability. .... It is by no means bug free or feature complete Facebook Expands Instant Personalization Program, Adds Rotten Tomatoes As Partner: The feature gives sites that have received Facebook’s blessing the ability to access any information you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook as soon as you arrive at the third-party site, with no authentication required. ... Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora .... a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive.....it was initially frustratingly difficult to opt-out of ..... people will totally freak out when they arrive at a site and it already knows who their friends are ..... “No revenue is ever exchanged as part of this program and user data cannot be transferred by partners to third-party ad networks.” .... reviews, food, travel, music, movies
Alex Payne: The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter: My unintentionally infamous tweet from months ago about a Twitter web experience that would compete with the best third-party clients ..... The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it..... the Twitter developer community needs to adapt to the post-#newtwitter reality. .... decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email
BusinessWeek: Dell Plans More Than $100 Billion Spending In China:over 10 years ..... Steve Ballmer projects the country may replace the U.S. as the largest PC market next year. ..... The company spent about $23 billion in China in 2009 .... Dell China President Amit Midha China Touts ‘Complete Package’ for California Railway: including financing .... linking Los Angeles and San Francisco .... trains that travel 350 kph (217 mph) and experience from building a 6,920 kilometer high-speed rail network, the world’s longest...... China will have twice as much high-speed rail track as the rest of the world combined by 2014 under a 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion) nationwide construction project ..... California’s planned high-speed rail network would haul passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 38 minutes. The journey takes six to eight hours by car or about one hour by plane. ..... will eventually link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco.
So let me tackle some of the questions after having introduced myself: To Iran, With Love (1). Over the past few days I have paced around a whole lot trying to grapple with as to the best way to present myself.
What did I do for Nepal?
How did I do it?
What can I do for Iran?
Why am I asking 20 VCs to put in 5K each in personal money towards this?
How Did I Do What I Did For Nepal?
I ended up giving a name to the method: nonviolent militancy. Not only are you strictly nonviolent, you are almost all digital. The battles take place on the screen for a big part. But the method is not the message. Unless you have a very high level of political consciousness, unless you have super political instincts, unless your political knowledge is robust, unless you are a disrupter in the best tradition of entrepreneurs, unless you have a firm commitment to the basic principles that underly any democracy movement, you can't do what I did for Nepal. My political credentials were outstanding, and so the technology behind the digital tools I ended up using came to be of service to me. The medium is not the message. On the other hand without the digital medium my work would not have been possible. The Internet allowed me the utter fearlessness that I exhibited at all junctures because it allowed me to be in the safety of New York City without many of the disadvantages of distance. On any given day, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on at the ground level in Nepal. I looked at Nepal from my distance the way an astrophysicist might look at planet Jupiter and do a very good job at it. The distance kept me safe, but it also gave me a certain objectivity, a certain detachment. That helped my work.
It was amazing to me over the course of my work spanning about two years eating into my savings that I was able to meet in person almost all the key political players in the drama in Nepal right here in New York City. I also discovered every little town in Nepal is represented by at least a few people in Queens. If that is true for the poorest country outside of Africa, that has to be true for every country on earth. That is why I have been saying for years everyone you need to spread democracy across the world lives right here in New York City. New York City truly is the capital city of the world. And if I networked hard enough in New York City, I realized I could get to know people who personally knew people in all the political parties in Nepal, in all the human rightsNGOs active in Nepal, in all the media houses there.
And I worked the phone. I called people in Nepal, in India, elsewhere.
And I worked the email circuit. Every time I received a mass email from some Nepali wishing me a Happy New Year or greetings for one of Nepal's major festivals, I would go ahead and harvest all the emails. And thus I ended up with the largest Nepali mailing list in the world. Someone once said when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas that if you knew 1500 people in Little Rock, you knew everyone who mattered in Arkansas. Well, those 1500 people for Nepal are all on my mailing list. There are about 8500 people on that list. Featured at the top is an email from the Prime Minister of Nepal, Madhav Nepal.
But the hub of all my work was my Nepal blog: Democracy For Nepal. And my primary data collection method was the wild wild web, the Internet. Anyone could have accessed all the information that I was able to access on a daily basis. I visited the websites of the newspapers out of Nepal. I had a Nepal section on my Google News page.
I was able to cash on the personal contacts I already had, and was able to build. But the Internet was my primary playground. Anyone could have accessed what I accessed, and I feel like anyone anywhere could apply the principles that I applied in Nepal, and intend to apply in Iran. Actually one big reason I want to get involved with Iran is so as to be able to prove what we did in Nepal can be done over and over again all over the world, everywhere where there is no democracy.
I will touch upon those principles later. Let me now get into what precisely I did for Nepal. I helped move the ball at all critical junctures of the peace process.
What I Did For Nepal
When the king of Nepal pulled his military coup in February 2005, the first thing I did was I surveyed the scene. I read all the news I could. I tracked down all my key contacts that had fled to Delhi in the aftermath, including the guy who is now president of Nepal.
Then I surveyed the political scene. Either the king was going to backtrack and go back to being a ceremonial monarch, or Nepal needed to end the monarchy, become a republic.
Now Nepal is a republic, but at that point in time republic was a big word to utter. None of the big democratic parties were for a republic. The king had jailed all their leaders and the parties were still singing the tunes of a constitutional monarchy. There is a term for that: mental slavery, the emotional dependence of the enslaved upon those who enslave them. The king showed signs he wanted to rule in an active way for a few decades. If they can do it in Saudi Arabia, why can't we do it in Nepal, he asked. Well, Saudi Arabia's time too will come.
I recognized there were three poles in Nepal: the royalists, the democrats and the Maoists. The only way to defeat the royalists was to forge an alliance between the other two forces. But that was not going to be easy because the Maoists had been waging a war for 10 years to establish a one party communist republic. They had been physically attacking and killing cadres of the largest democratic parties. How do you do business with them? At that point they had managed to dismantle the barely existent state apparatus in about 80% of the country.
The roadmap I proposed was this. The Maoists were for a communist republic. The big democratic parties were for a ceremonial monarchy. They needed to find common ground, which was the idea of a democratic republic. I sent overtures to the number two Maoist, Baburam Bhattarai. He sent overtures back, but that got him into trouble. The number one Maoist had him arrested by his own bodyguards. Later I appealed for his release, and he was released.
Around this time a fellow Nepali activist based out of New York City sent out an email saying the army in Nepal had had her father disappeared. The danger was real. No wonder most Nepalis in the diaspora tried not to put their names to the cause. They preferred private to public, offline to online. I spoke up at my blog. Her father was released a few days later.
Once there was convergence between the Maoists and the democrats behind the idea of a democratic republic, it was time to go all the way and try to forge a strong alliance against the monarchists. It took long months, but finally they all got together behind the idea of holding elections to a constituent assembly.
The Maoists were still at war. Now that some common ground had been found, it was time for the Maoists to lay down the weapon. I proposed something pretty out of the box: unilateral ceasefire. How would the king respond? Could he keep fighting? No, he could not.
Around this time I also got impatient with Girija Koirala, the de facto leader in the democratic camp for being the oldest person, and threw my weight behind Madhav Nepal who went on to organize some of the largest one day rallies over the coming months.
Once the Maoist-Democrat alliance was formed, it was time to go for a mass movement. Here Ukraine in 2004 was my inspiration. The Nepali leaders kept thinking in terms of a rally here, a rally there, a shutdown here, a shutdown there. From the very beginning I was pushing for a Ukraine repeat, that we needed to come out into the streets and stay out there until the regime collapsed. That is what ended up happening only what happened in Nepal was much much bigger than what happened in Ukraine, and much bigger than anything I had imagined. But this was not a sure thing at all. The Maoists started thinking now the democrats had finally come around to their idea of a final armed struggle and an assault on the capital city. That suggestion I fought tooth and nail. Around this time I also hired a blogger in Kathmandu to video blog all street protests. That proved fundamental. At the time noone was doing that. Those videos got the Nepali diaspora excited. (Umesh, Turn It Into A Business, Mero Sansar Video Clips, Blogger Receives Death Threat, Bloggers Form Union) I also had to fight American tendencies to want to fight the Maoists to the military finish, to see them as the first opponent, we will deal with an autocratic king later attitude: Robert Kaplan Is An American Cowboy.
This is the gist of the developments leading up to the mass movement of April 2006 when eight of the country's 27 million people came out into the streets to shut the country down completely. Every step can be retraced at my Nepal blog. Here I have provided just a summary. Keeping my work transparent in real time was important to me even back then because I held a strong belief even back then that this work was relevant to many other countries. In April 2006 I came across a blog post by some anonymous member of the Zimbabwean diaspora that asked, why can't we have in Zimbabwe what they just had in Nepal? It was a good feeling for me to come across that sentiment.
In my next blog post I will tackle the other two questions.
What can I do for Iran?
Why am I asking 20 VCs to put in 5K each in personal money towards this?
I have hinted at it before, but today I am going to spell it out. Digital Dumbo is the best tech party in town. There, I said it. And Dumbo is the only locale of its kind in town. New York City is too big, there is too much happening, there are too many big, established industries - there is finance, there is media, there is Queens ... okay, so Queens is not an industry, Africa is not a country - for all of this city to turn into some kind of a tech haven. But Dumbo has carved it out. Dumbo is tech Mecca. And it is an amazing location. You see the bridge, the belly of the bridge nonetheless, the water, and you see Manhattan. That is too many good things at once. It feels urban, it feels tech. Dumbo is the go to place in town if you are a techie or someone obsessed with tech.
I was a little blase about Internet Week, I figured I got a little too excited about Social Media Week back in February, so I would take this one a little easy. But I might have missed out. And the July 1 Digital Dumbo might let me do some catching up. The July 1 Digital Dumbo is presenting itself as the wrap up party for Internet Week. That right there tells most of the movers and shakers of Internet Week are camped out in Dumbo.
Digital DUMBO #17 IWNY Wrap Up
Thursday, July 01, 2010 from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (ET)
Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Did you miss out on Internet Week NY? Or maybe you had so much fun networking and crashing parties that you want to re-live it all over again?
Join us for a summary & wrap party Digital DUMBO style where we will showcase some of the work done for the event by Dumbo's finest. We're heading back to Galapagos and we hope to see you there to toast to another Internet Week NY event gone by!
Yes, I did miss out. I was able to go to only four events during Internet Week, and I missed the biggest one: IgniteNYC, after having given word to the chief organizer, emcee person Tikva Morawati only the evening before that I will be there. Ugh. (Ignite, Set It On Fire) Something came up that had me tied.
I went to an amazing, amazing event earlier in the evening (NextGen Africa Forum @ NYU June 14), and I am blogging away, sipping - more like gulping - mango lassi I made. Mine does not look as good. I put too much yogurt and ice cream and not enough mango pulp into it.
You had to be there to feel the magic of the moment. Online video will not be able to replicate it. When was the last time I went to an event in town this amazing? It was that good. And the four people on stage, I had never heard of their names only two days ago.
I was hoping some of the crowd would spill over to the after party, but there were maybe a half dozen people there and I left.
I was a few minutes late. Somebody was already speaking. She was in the process of introducing the Vice President of Malawi. After the event was over, I walked over to shake her hand. I tried to muster some protocol, or at least my version of it, in the process.
"Madam Vice President, it is an honor to be able to meet you in person, and shake your hand like this," I said.
"Thanks for coming," she said simply and moved to shake the next hand. I took two steps back, lingered around for about five seconds, walked sideways three steps and walked away. Then I spotted the Goods4Good leader, the emcee of the event.
"You are in some kind of an ad," I said to her. "I looked you up on YouTube yesterday, and that showed up first thing."
She looked amused.
"Good question," she said.
I had asked one of the questions from the floor.
"Hi, my name is Paramendra. There has been tremendous buzz in social media about this event which is how I found out about it, there has been buzz all the way to The Huffington Post. Until yesterday I had never heard of the four of you; that makes me an ignorant person. I looked all four of you up on YouTube yesterday. I am very impressed with the work you have done ...... My question is, would it be possible to scale your good work, because the number of affected children is just so large, or do we not have a big solution to the big problem?"
Ann Veneman gave the best answer. She said ultimately these problems have to be tackled at the policy level. But Dr. Jane Aronson gave the most heart warming answer. When I met her in person later, I said that to her in different words.
"The take away lesson for me with you is," I said, "you have to maintain good spirits, you have to be cracking jokes, and you have to having good time, while you work on big, hard social problems, or you are going to not be able to do much good."
That spirit is exemplified in Jane's funky green Gandhi glasses. Blue? It was green at the time I talked to her.
A few minutes later when I got to pass by Melissa Kushner, the emcee, one more time I said to her, "I sent you a tweet earlier." She reacted like I had sent her a parcel.
"Thank you," she said.
I made small talk with a few people from Malawi. So I met this one woman from Malawi, she said she did her college in Arkansas. I have been to Arkansas, I said. A minute later another woman from Malawi walked into us. I asked if they knew each other. They said no. So I introduced one to the other. One lived in the Bronx, the other in Westchester.
I told them a Westchester story. A family friend of mine - a doctor - from my hometown in Nepal lives in Westchester, bought a house, is raising his family and stuff. Somebody new from that town showed up in New York City a few months back. He got taken to the house.
"He lives in the trees," the new guy said later. He was not impressed. So much for the aura of suburbs.
I showed up for the event dressed formally. Well, that means putting on a white shirt. Otherwise my favorite form of attire has only one thing missing from what I was wearing: the white shirt. And the tie stays out of range. The tie is the most useless piece of clothing ever. Maybe it is good for wiping your nose or something.
The take away quote from the event for me that gave me a belly aching laugh did not come from the main part of the event, or from the four featured panelists, and this might reflect my tech bias.
A Tom Rielly got to talk for a few minutes towards the end, and he showed eight minutes of a film about the guy who is now headed to Dartmouth College.
So this guy goes through hell and high water, and years later he gets to access Google, and does a search on windmills, and tens of thousands of diagrams show up that could have saved him so much work, and so he says,"Where was this Google all this time?"
