Passionate about Nature and Photography, Prasenjeet found a way to bring the two together to bring about change. He used the powerful medium of storytelling- purely through his photographs in collaboration with researchers and conservationists. His stories are visual with strong messages embedded in environmental, science and conservation stories. He was the recipient of the National Geographic Explorers grant and is currently producing a story on SkyIslands of Southern India under his Explorers program.
Prasenjeet enthralled the audience with his stumbling into molecular ecology and his work that bridges the gap between the scientific and non-scientific community.
One of his shots captured a beautiful Green meteorite! As he says he thought every photograph has 3 components-the subject, the technical details and the aesthetics. Now he knows it has only 2 components- a reality and a dream
Dr. Shannon Olsson is a scientist and researcher heading the Naturalist-Inspired Chemical Ecology group at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India. Her amazing work urges us to wonder how insects with brains that have nearly one million times fewer neurons than our own have the ability to discriminated food from danger almost right birth. Studying and understanding these remarkable abilities on our ecosystems is the core of her work, which she promotes widely by traveling across the world.
Shannon speaks the language of nature. With less than 15% of women researchers and less than 1% of foreign researchers in India, Shannon is one of the rare breed of women ecological researchers in India. The incredible biodiversity in the Western Ghats keeps her hooked to this amazing country. In her own words, “India’s future is the world’s future.”
Her talk throws light on learning to communicate with Nature and how chemicals play an important role in this communication between man and Nature. She reveals how old living communities innately understand their relationship with Ecology in everyday life. She urges us to stop to listen to the stories of nature
Anil Menon is president of the Smart+Connected Communities (S+CC) initiative at Cisco. He has been responsible for various country transformation initiatives in countries like Turkey, Russia, South Korea, Israel, France, Indonesia, UAE and India. With India’s emphasis on the development of Smart Cities as the major strategy in the coming decade, his contribution to the country becomes invaluable.
Anil throws an alarming statistic The world turned 50% urban just last year! 10000 people an hour a day move to the cities.
While the world is grappling with ways to solve the problems of ecological balance, Anil thinks the key is to rethink how we build our cities, to bring down the digital divide in the world.
He urges us to think if we would work and live the same way if we had an affordable digital infrastructure? If we had unlimited computing, unlimited bandwidth. He brings to us incredible possibilities in the field of Healthcare, Education, Social equality, Governance just with the power of technology and smarter cities.
Gouri’s dual passions for social entrepreneurship and the environment found fruition in her award-winning project ” The Learning Farm.” The Learning Farm is an organic farm that provides agricultural and the much-needed business training to make the next generations of farmers sustainable as a community in Indonesia. She is also the co-founder of the HUB in Singapore, a network for Asian social entrepreneurs as part of a much larger global network of 6000 innovators across 40 hubs in five continents. Among other things, she is also the founder of Connected for Good, a network hub for good causes across Asia, founder of I-Hear, an advocacy group for the deaf and an advisor for the International Dance Festival of Indonesia.
Gouri inspires us through the story of giving back skills to the youth and having them go back to their roots. With villages in Indonesia are being emptied of its youth at an alarming rate to find work in the city-, there was an urgent need to find a way to make their own skill profitable and sustainable for them.
So she started “The learning farm”-a residential farm to give youth the life skills they need and help them go back to their own communities. The learning farm has an award-winning curriculum with music, movement and art therapy included to make their lives visible again.
In her own words, “We enable them to create the ripples of change which we are not equipped to create ourselves- which is the best way to create impact.”
