Comets and Craters — Attending unConference, Noida 2016
-Talib Monib Ahmad
If you are creative, you can do almost anything anywhere but at the same time there is a perfect place for every event and activity. Performing yoga on a railway station platform is certainly very patriotic but it would be much nicer and far more productive if you could do it at a spot which is a bit more quiet and detached. Learning City unConference, Noida was a perfect combination of venue and event because when you walk into Prakriti School, you know that you have walked into a different world. You don’t need a kid with a garland and a clichéd welcome speech to tell you that — you know it. This event was my introduction to Prakriti (also my first unConference so pardon the over sentimentality which is to follow) and I was more than impressed when I came in for volunteering two days before the event. And I could go on forever about the energy which radiates from every room and corridor of Prakriti but why don’t you just go feel it for yourself.
Once the day was on, it spread like fire. One thing led to another and the most beautiful part of the event was perhaps that there was something for everyone and the worst that you couldn’t check out most of it since it was all happening at the same time. My poetic antenna was buzzing as I found metaphors for life strewn all around me. Choices, ideas, decisions, sincerity, revolution and above all, lots of love. These were a few of the defining features of the moment.
Although I must admit that at times it was uncomfortably overwhelming: What am I doing with my life? This brings me to what was perhaps my biggest take away from the entire experience: don’t think, do it. Thoughts are like petrol — you fill your car tank and then go where you have to go. The end is not the filling of the tank but the act of travelling. Sitting for days at the pump with an overflowing tank is a bad idea for more than one reason.
Each musical instrument in an orchestra conveys a sense of beauty by itself. They can each stand on their own but there is something far more enchanting about them playing at the same time, complementing, supplementing, mischievously standing out and honourably holding it all together.
One can mention the merits and functions of each instrument but the instrument loses its individuality for the greater harmony of the entire orchestra and by doing so becomes more significant, powerful. The unConference Orchestra (if I may call it that) sounded very much divine and the pottery became all the more magical and the Chaat far more delicious, and the music! Oh! The music became so much more musical because it was all then and there.
I remember, on my way back, at the metro station how my friend and another lady got into a quarrel with the security staff because they wouldn’t let them carry their potted plants through the security post (I’m sure quite a few people had this experience that day). Finally the two ladies unloaded the soil from the pot into their bags and carried their plants through. It made me think just how important it was for them to preserve even the soil that they had been gifted. You can get a handful of soil anywhere but that soil was special for them.
In an ocean of mediocrity, an individual striving to be creative is like a pirate with good intentions (or sometimes not). There are many pirates but sadly they are so few and so far apart that it is not very easy to find them. The world is hard on you if you try to be a pirate. It comes at you with its classifications, gradations and expectations to sink you. It is necessary therefore to stick together and be friends with people who can kick you out of the petrol pump and off on the highway. Learning city unConference Noida was a kick and a call for me. There is so much to think about but far more importantly, there is so much more to do with those thoughts.