বোকাসোকা কথা: TEDx Dhaka

You know we hosted “TEDxDhaka” the first TEDx event (X= independently organized TED event) in Bangladesh on last Thursday (25th June, 2009)!
As usual we had no fund :-p ! My alma mater The University of Asia Pacific, School of Architecture provided us their large Open Studio as the venue for free. My university also gave us projector, screen and drinking water for the guests! I'm so thankful to the head of the school Dr. Abu Sayeed Ahmed for kindly accompany us during the event for providing us with all those extras.
Last year just two months after I got the notification about my fellowship, I got another mail from an unknown guy in Dhaka. He was talking about a meeting of all the ‘TED fans’ in Bangladesh! I was very amazed to learn that someone else is there in my town who is eager enough to call a meeting through TED.com's emailing system! I replied him with the news of my fellowship. He was equally excited! He is Mr. Cal Jahan. He has watched every TED Talk ever published in TED.com (and now few unpublished talks as well from my TED 2009 DVD!). And from then we are connected and we are sharing our TEDenergy together.
So obviously Cal and me were the two mainly behind arranging TEDxDhaka. And of course many of my junior friends in the campus helped us arranging the stuffs. Special thanks goes to Rubel Raf (ArchSociety Moderator) for technical supports, Siam Sajid for still photography, Sanjeed Mahmood for shooting the videos, Arif Khan and Pallab Chakrabarti for other logistics.

Around 70 people came. Majority of the participants were architects or architecture students, including my teacher Architect Tanya Karim and Dr. Abu Sayeed Ahmed, plus there were attendees from I.T. related professions, environmental engineers, students from archaeology, liberal arts and more.
The participations in small discussions after every talk were very stimulating. At the beginning I gave an intro about all the TED brands and activities. Then we showed a deliberately mixed set of TED Talks intended to draw the first impression of the attendees about a TEDx event, to give a glimpse of contemporary architecture and technology, and to draw some awareness about some educational, social and environmental issues.
We showed talks by Joshua Prince-Ramus on his unique strategy of programmatic rational architecture, Adam Gassler and his sustainable fridge, Sugata Mitra on how kids teach themselves, David Merrill demos Siftables… Cal and me moderated the short discussions and after each talk. After David Merrill there was a power cut! And we had no power backup. Power cuts are very usual in Dhaka. And it was for around half an hour.
Bonnie Bassler’s how bacteria communicate’ was the next talk. During the power cut Cal continued Bonnie Bassler’s story in the dark and everyone eagerly listened to the bacteria’s quorum sensing communication system! The electricity didn’t come back and then I started my presentation without slides about my TED experience and ArchSociety.
As many of the architect participants were either members of ArchSociety or works with Archsociety so they were excited listen to all the stories. And those who were still not a part of ArchSociety I’m sure they were motivated to be part of it to join in the movement of open-source knowledge for architecture and design.
After I finished there was a long discussion about the present, future and strategies of ArchSociety. And the electricity came back! We lost few of our guests during this power interruption. And those who left missed more interesting talks lol.
We continued show with Moshe Safdie’sbuilding uniqueness, Pattie Maes’s demo of the sixth sense device. I loved to see the amazed eyes of the attendees! Lastly it was a talk by Hans Rosling (although it was not a TED Talk, this talk was collected from Rosling’s Gapminder, we informed Lara Stein and Becca Pace about showing a non-TED-Talk video) on ‘Bangladesh Miracle’. There were a lot of applauses, (although lastly there were less attendees present after the power cut, however) those who were there they were absolutely amazed after watching all the talks and participating in the discussions.

We got a lot of ‘sorry’ and ‘sigh’ messages from those who couldn’t participate or couldn’t manage to stay till the end. And we got many requests to arrange TEDx events regularly.
Next time we will try to host it in a better venue (at least where we will get power backups! lol).