When Shakespeare said all the world's a stage and all the men and women mere players, he perhaps forgot to widen his talk to include who is more important than the other. But time and again, stages are made around the world, men and women are invited to act and it is purely left to the audience to decide who has made a bigger impact on the society through their roles, no matter in which form and which part of the planet, and at times, beyond the planet.
The second edition of the INK Conference, recently held in Pink City, Jaipur, tried to put up a great stage to showcase some of the greatest heroes and most of them are not celebrities in the common parlance, but have performed more heroic acts than the superstars. Many of them have conquered mountains literally and some have conquered death, some have given a million people a reason to live, and some have made efforts to provide the means for a billion people for their living. The conference that stands for Innovation and Knowledge (INK) was staged this year around the theme 'Power of the Journey', and true to its theme, the event in the town of Jaipur took the 1,000 plus audience to some journeys-some short journeys limited to a geographical area of a small town to the longest journey possible, to space.
“INK is all about identifying and recognizing new heroes-people who come from amongst us,” says Lakshmi Pratury, the lady who designed the INK. She says these are the people who have dared to take a different path, one that is less traveled. “They redefine success in times when everything is so myopic, during an era of a mad rush towards success. This attitude stands in contrast to the general trend that focuses only on results-rather than enjoying the path that leads towards results,” says Pratury, whom Forbes once considered as among the 100 most powerful women in the world.
A Platform for Thinkers
The annual INK conference, being held in association with TED, aims to fuel innovation and foster knowledge by giving a platform to thinkers and doers from a range of disciplines to share their stories. TED or technology, entertainment, and design is a global set of conferences owned by private not-for-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate innovative ideas. Every year, the TED-INK collaboration helps 20 self-believers/entrepreneurs, called the INK fellows, who travel their long cherished path, most of the time defying the conventional, and reaching the dreams that they have been chasing for so long. This year's edition, that spanned 4 days, apart from the INK fellows, brought together a host of other speakers who have been no less innovative in their fields.
Ruchi Shangvi is one of them. As the first woman engineer at Facebook Inc, she helped build technologies for the social networking site-including the news feed and Facebook connect-that have contributed heavily towards making it the phenomenon it is. After the initial success, she quit the firm to return to India to marry a person of her family's choice, but only to return soon. She quit the company again in 2010, even as Facebook has achieved 700 mn users and is staring at one of the most successful initial public offers ever for a technology firm. “I was getting complacent because of the success,” she reasons. Sanghvi has now founded an internet venture called Cove along with other former Facebook employees. She is not ready to share more information on the idea she is working on. “It will be in the area of consumer internet and will be platform-agnostic,” is all she says. 
Deepak Ravindran of SMS Gyaan is another speaker and a great example of the 'power of the journey.' In his journey, along with his friends, he tries to answer questions on myriad topics like: Why are the birds so angry in Angry Birds? Why is the apple half bitten in the Apple Inc logo? Why is the popular sandwich called a hot dog when there is no dog meat in it? How to impress a girl...Ravindran's SMS Gyaan seeks to address just about any query through the text service of the ubiquitous mobile phones, keeping the privacy of people's various dilemmas. The idea was born when Ravindran, 23, realized that most people in the country don't have the luxury of Googling for information, but are equipped with a mobile phone. He tried his luck to use the power of mobile phones to provide answers for “any question under the sun”.
The venture that was born from the helpless condition of Deepak on not being able to answer his friend's question on 'how to impress a girl' while sitting in his college corridor in Kerala, is now bustling with success. The success of the venture, now available with most telecom service providers, is ascertained by the fact that its research and development team in Bengaluru processes 500,000 queries in a day. SMS Gyaan went live in March after a short-testing phase. Ravindran, who hopes to clock a turnover of `15 crore this year, says the firm has already broken even.
Enjoy the Journey
There was no dearth of inspiring examples in this edition of conference and each of the fellows narrates a story that all of us would like to put our names on. However the INK fellows were chosen after an exhaustive online process.
Pratury, host and curator of INK, who is also credited with bringing TED to India in 2009, says the one thing that binds the INK fellows is their accomplishments “These people might not be glamorous figures, but what they are doing is having a huge impact on the society. They bring something out-of-the-box, a fresh perspective along with a sense of humility, and INK is just a platform for them to express themselves and share their stories, which may inspire others too”.
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