In the last few months since I shifted to the National Capital Region (NCR), I have been to numerous seminars and conferences, which are usually conducted in the Indian Habitat Centre, India International Centre or Constitutional Club, amongst other places. I don’t have a great sample size or empirical backing for the points made in this piece. Nevertheless, it is an attempt to understand a typical conference with my limited experience.
1. A blend of Corporate and Human rights Tea
These events don’t have the human rights tea which one could find in Tapri. At the same time, it doesn’t have that tasteless tea, which often appears so white(without chai patti), but a perfect balance of chai patti, which appears precisely that much brown, the way the crowd attending is brown.
2. Finding an old liberal ally in the audience
Besides the familiar taste of tea and the quality of biscuits, one thing which is common in all these seminars is the crowd attending these sessions. Be it the session on any art, criminal justice or even a discussion on press freedom, one can always find an ally whom they met three conferences ago. It is interesting that they are in a new group with them this time, where one person is showing how bad their work life is going.
3. The 0.3 second government representative
It is also highly likely that we are going to network with the few bureaucrats (retired but pride being intact) and governmental representatives who have a reaction time of 0.3 seconds to take out their identity cards as soon as you finish your first sentence of the introduction.
4. DU representation in question asking
There will always be a group of few DU students who are usually the ones who constitute a ‘question-asking group’ in these conferences. The English-speaking organisers are very inclusive and humble, so they prefer the young girl sitting in the second row and give them the opportunity to ask questions in their inclusive English.
5. The eye-rolling group
And then there is a very interesting group, which has the responsibility of eye-rolling whenever there is a pro-government stance being taken by any of the speakers. This eye-rolling group has been cited often across academia. This group also has the higher moral responsibility to demolish one speaker’s argument within the 2.5 minutes of time they ask their questions (even when the organiser had limited the time to be 1 minute per question)
6. Noida and Gurgaon +1s
Some of the audience reached the conference late because, at the last moment, they decided to get +1 in this session even without registration. Their +1 took time in Noida and Gurgaon to finish their chores, and the Uber guy cancelled multiple times. This delay of +1s delayed the entire conference by at least 15 minutes to half an hour
7. The responsibility of being the last speaker
The Humble last speaker( who is usually the most brilliant) will now make the best points in their 4-minute speech because the organisers were running late in time, and instead of originally allocated 10 minutes, they now have to capture the entire Climate Change discourse of South Asia in 4 minutes.
8. The mandatory ‘Habitat Hub’ restaurant visit
If a group is attending this session at India Habitat Centre, the chances are that they plan to sit at Habitat Hub for some time. The group that enters the restaurant discusses intensely how the income gap has widened and how only a few have access to basic services. The group assumes that everyone will be eager to pay 525 INR for the cheapest pasta, in a restaurant where the average of the bill usually comes to INR 3000 for two. However, everyone has just enjoyed the talk on the neo-impoverishment of Delhi slum dwellers and is now a bit hungry
After the talk, out of the 120 people in the audience, 110 went back home and applied the few precedents they remembered from this talk (when they were not using phones). The other 10 just wonder why there weren’t 60 out of these 120 participants.
Questions for the Future:
I will just end with a few questions while I am dissecting the session’s structure.
Are we engaging with enough diverse crowd? Do these sessions have an outreach plan which reaches beyond the echo chambers? Do the themes we are discussing demand more integration of the communities which are affected? Is it time to go beyond the English narrative and introduce a mix of language? Or should I just stop going to these sessions? Is monologue and a panel discussion going to be the norm when most of the audience zones out, or have we accepted this as the way of discourse?
I don’t have answers, and I am a fairly hypocritical participant of the 8 pointers stated above, but I hope to go beyond this structure of a conference. And I wish this space of knowledge democratises space and incorporates more engaging solutions.
Featured image is for representational purposes only.