Why nations should pursue "soft" power | Shashi Tharoor

1,159,385 views ・ 2009-12-02

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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As an Indian, and now as a politician
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and a government minister,
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I've become rather concerned about
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the hype we're hearing about our own country,
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all this talk about India becoming a world leader,
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even the next superpower.
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In fact, the American publishers of my book,
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"The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cell Phone,"
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added a gratuitous subtitle saying,
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"India: The next 21st-century power."
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And I just don't think that's what India's all about,
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or should be all about.
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Indeed, what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership
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seems to me terribly archaic.
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It's redolent of James Bond movies
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and Kipling ballads.
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After all, what constitutes a world leader?
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If it's population, we're on course to top the charts.
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We will overtake China by 2034.
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Is it military strength? Well, we have the world's fourth largest army.
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Is it nuclear capacity? We know we have that.
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The Americans have even recognized it,
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in an agreement.
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Is it the economy? Well, we have now
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the fifth-largest economy in the world
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in purchasing power parity terms.
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And we continue to grow. When the rest of the world took a beating last year,
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we grew at 6.7 percent.
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But, somehow, none of that adds up to me,
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to what I think India really can aim to contribute in the world,
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in this part of the 21st century.
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And so I wondered, could
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what the future beckons for India to be all about
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be a combination of these things allied to something else,
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the power of example,
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the attraction of India's culture,
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what, in other words, people like to call "soft power."
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Soft power is a concept invented by a Harvard academic,
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Joseph Nye, a friend of mine.
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And, very simply, and I'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here,
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it's essentially the ability of a country to attract others
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because of its culture, its political values,
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its foreign policies.
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And, you know, lots of countries do this. He was writing initially about the States,
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but we know the Alliance Francaise
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is all about French soft power, the British Council.
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The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power.
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Americans have the Voice of America and the Fulbright scholarships.
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But, the fact is, in fact,
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that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds
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have done more for American soft power
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around the world than any specifically government activity.
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So soft power is something that really emerges
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partly because of governments,
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but partly despite governments.
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And in the information era we all live in today,
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what we might call the TED age,
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I'd say that countries are increasingly being judged
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by a global public that's been fed
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on an incessant diet of Internet news,
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of televised images,
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of cellphone videos, of email gossip.
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In other words, all sorts of communication devices
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are telling us the stories of countries,
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whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories.
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Now, in this age, again, countries with access
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to multiple channels of communication
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and information have a particular advantage.
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And of course they have more influence, sometimes, about how they're seen.
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India has more all-news TV channels
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than any country in the world,
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in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together.
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But, the fact still is that it's not just that.
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In order to have soft power, you have to be connected.
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One might argue that India has become
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an astonishingly connected country.
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I think you've already heard the figures.
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We've been selling 15 million cellphones a month.
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Currently there are 509 million cellphones
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in Indian hands, in India.
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And that makes us larger than the U.S. as a telephone market.
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In fact, those 15 million cellphones
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are the most connections that any country,
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including the U.S. and China,
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has ever established in the history of telecommunications.
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But, what perhaps some of you don't realize
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is how far we've come to get there.
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You know, when I grew up in India,
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telephones were a rarity.
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In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament
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had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines
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as a favor to those they deemed worthy.
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If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman
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or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone.
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But sometimes it just sat there.
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I went to high school in Calcutta.
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And we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer.
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But half the time we would pick it up
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with an expectant look on our faces,
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there would be no dial tone.
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If there was a dial tone and you dialed a number,
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the odds were two in three you wouldn't get the number you were intending to reach.
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In fact the words "wrong number" were more popular than the word "Hello."
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(Laughter)
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If you then wanted to connect to another city,
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let's say from Calcutta you wanted to call Delhi,
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you'd have to book something called a trunk call,
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and then sit by the phone all day, waiting for it to come through.
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Or you could pay eight times the going rate
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for something called a lightning call.
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But, lightning struck rather slowly in our country in those days,
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so, it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through.
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In fact, so woeful was our telephone service
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that a Member of Parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this.
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And the Then-Communications Minister replied in a lordly manner
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that in a developing country
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communications are a luxury, not a right,
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that the government had no obligation to provide better service,
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and if the honorable Member wasn't satisfied with his telephone,
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could he please return it, since there was an eight-year-long waiting list
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for telephones in India.
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Now, fast-forward to today and this is what you see:
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the 15 million cell phones a month.
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But what is most striking is who is carrying those cell phones.
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You know, if you visit friends in the suburbs of Delhi,
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on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart
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that looks like it was designed in the 16th century,
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wielding a coal-fired steam iron
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that might have been invented in the 18th century.
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He's called an isthri wala. But he's carrying a 21st-century instrument.
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He's carrying a cell phone because most incoming calls are free,
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and that's how he gets orders from the neighborhood,
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to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed.
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The other day I was in Kerala, my home state,
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at the country farm of a friend,
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about 20 kilometers away from any place you'd consider urban.
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And it was a hot day and he said, "Hey, would you like some fresh coconut water?"
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And it's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink
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on a hot day in the tropics, so I said sure.
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And he whipped out his cellphone, dialed the number,
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and a voice said, "I'm up here."
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And right on top of the nearest coconut tree,
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with a hatchet in one hand and a cell phone in the other,
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was a local toddy tapper,
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who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink.
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Fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cell phones.
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When they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast
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to find out where they get the best possible prices.
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Farmers now, who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor
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to find out if the market town was open,
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if the market was on,
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whether the product they'd harvested could be sold, what price they'd fetch.
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They'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge
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to the market town to get that information and come back,
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then they'd load the cart.
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Today they're saving half a day's labor with a two minute phone call.
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So this empowerment of the underclass
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is the real result of India being connected.
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And that transformation is part of where India is heading today.
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But, of course that's not the only thing about India that's spreading.
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You've got Bollywood. My attitude to Bollywood is best summarized
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in the tale of the two goats at a Bollywood garbage dump --
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Mr. Shekhar Kapur, forgive me --
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and they're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a Bollywood studio.
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And the first goat, chewing away, says, "You know, this film is not bad."
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And the second goat says, "No, the book was better."
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(Laughter)
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I usually tend to think that the book is usually better,
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but, having said that,
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the fact is that Bollywood is now
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taking a certain aspect of Indian-ness and Indian culture around the globe,
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not just in the Indian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K.,
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but to the screens of Arabs and Africans, of Senegalese and Syrians.
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I've met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother
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in a village in Senegal
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takes a bus once a month to the capital city of Dakar,
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just to watch a Bollywood movie.
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She can't understand the dialogue.
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She's illiterate, so she can't read the French subtitles.
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But these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps,
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and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action.
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She goes away with stars in her eyes about India, as a result.
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And this is happening more and more.
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Afghanistan, we know what a serious security problem
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Afghanistan is for so many of us in the world.
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India doesn't have a military mission there.
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You know what was India's biggest asset in Afghanistan in the last seven years?
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One simple fact:
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you couldn't try to call an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening.
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Why? Because that was the moment
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when the Indian television soap opera,
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"Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi," dubbed into Dari, was telecast on Tolo T.V.
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And it was the most popular television show in Afghan history.
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Every Afghan family wanted to watch it.
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They had to suspend functions at 8:30.
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Weddings were reported to be interrupted
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so guests could cluster around the T.V. set,
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and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom.
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Crime went up at 8:30. I have read a Reuters dispatch --
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so this is not Indian propaganda, a British news agency --
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about how robbers in the town of Musarri Sharif*
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stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers,
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its hubcaps, its sideview mirrors,
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any moving part they could find, at 8:30,
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because the watchmen were busy watching the T.V. rather than minding the store.
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And they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show's heroine,
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"Tulsi Zindabad": "Long live Tulsi."
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(Laughter)
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That's soft power. And that is what India is developing
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through the "E" part of TED:
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its own entertainment industry.
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The same is true, of course -- we don't have time for too many more examples --
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but it's true of our music, of our dance,
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of our art, yoga, ayurveda, even Indian cuisine.
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I mean, the proliferation of Indian restaurants
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since I first went abroad as a student, in the mid '70s,
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and what I see today, you can't go to a mid-size town in Europe or North America
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and not find an Indian restaurant. It may not be a very good one.
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But, today in Britain, for example,
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Indian restaurants in Britain
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employ more people than the coal mining,
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ship building and iron and steel industries combined.
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So the empire can strike back.
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(Applause)
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But, with this increasing awareness of India,
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with yoga and ayurveda, and so on,
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with tales like Afghanistan,
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comes something vital in the information era,
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the sense that in today's world
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it's not the side of the bigger army that wins,
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it's the country that tells a better story that prevails.
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And India is, and must remain, in my view, the land of the better story.
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Stereotypes are changing. I mean, again, having gone to the U.S.
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as a student in the mid '70s,
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I knew what the image of India was then, if there was an image at all.
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Today, people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere
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speak of the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Technology
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with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT.
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This can sometimes have unintended consequences. OK.
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I had a friend, a history major like me,
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who was accosted at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam,
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by an anxiously perspiring European saying,
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"You're Indian, you're Indian! Can you help me fix my laptop?"
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(Laughter)
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We've gone from the image of India as
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land of fakirs lying on beds of nails,
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and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick,
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to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses,
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computer wizards, software gurus.
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But that too is transforming the Indian story around the world.
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But, there is something more substantive to that.
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The story rests on a fundamental platform
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of political pluralism.
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It's a civilizational story to begin with.
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Because India has been an open society for millennia.
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India gave refuge to the Jews, fleeing the destruction of the first temple
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by the Babylonians, and said thereafter by the Romans.
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In fact, legend has is that when Doubting Thomas, the Apostle, Saint Thomas,
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landed on the shores of Kerala, my home state,
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somewhere around 52 A.D.,
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he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl.
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And to this day remains the only Jewish diaspora
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in the history of the Jewish people, which has never encountered
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a single incident of anti-semitism.
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(Applause)
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That's the Indian story.
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Islam came peacefully to the south,
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slightly more differently complicated history in the north.
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But all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in India.
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You know, we just celebrated, this year, our general elections,
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the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history.
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And the next one will be even bigger, because our voting population
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keeps growing by 20 million a year.
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But, the fact is
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that the last elections, five years ago,
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gave the world extraordinary phenomenon
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of an election being won by a woman political leader
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of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Sonia Gandhi,
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who then made way for a Sikh, Mohan Singh,
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to be sworn in as Prime Minister
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by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam,
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in a country 81 percent Hindu.
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(Applause)
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This is India, and of course it's all the more striking
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because it was four years later that we all applauded
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the U.S., the oldest democracy in the modern world,
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more than 220 years of free and fair elections,
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which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president
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who wasn't white, male or Christian.
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So, maybe -- oh sorry, he is Christian, I beg your pardon --
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and he is male, but he isn't white.
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All the others have been all those three.
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(Laughter)
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All his predecessors have been all those three,
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and that's the point I was trying to make.
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(Laughter)
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But, the issue is
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that when I talked about that example,
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it's not just about talking about India, it's not propaganda.
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Because ultimately, that electoral outcome
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had nothing to do with the rest of the world.
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It was essentially India being itself.
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And ultimately, it seems to me,
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that always works better than propaganda.
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Governments aren't very good at telling stories.
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But people see a society for what it is,
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and that, it seems to me, is what ultimately
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will make a difference in today's information era,
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in today's TED age.
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So India now is no longer
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the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion,
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because we have every ethnicity known to mankind, practically,
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we've every religion know to mankind,
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with the possible exception of Shintoism,
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though that has some Hindu elements somewhere.
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We have 23 official languages that are recognized in our Constitution.
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And those of you who cashed your money here
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might be surprised to see how many scripts there are
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on the rupee note, spelling out the denominations.
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We've got all of that.
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We don't even have geography uniting us,
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because the natural geography of the subcontinent
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framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked
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by the partition with Pakistan in 1947.
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In fact, you can't even take the name of the country for granted,
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because the name "India" comes from the river Indus,
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which flows in Pakistan.
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But, the whole point is that India
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is the nationalism of an idea.
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It's the idea of an ever-ever-land,
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emerging from an ancient civilization,
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united by a shared history,
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but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy.
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That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one.
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And it's the nationalism of an idea that
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essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed,
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color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter,
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and still rally around a consensus.
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And the consensus is of a very simple principle,
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that in a diverse plural democracy like India
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you don't really have to agree on everything all the time,
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so long as you agree on the ground rules
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of how you will disagree.
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The great success story of India,
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a country that so many learned scholars and journalists
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assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and '60s,
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is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus.
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Now, that is the India that is emerging into the 21st century.
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And I do want to make the point
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that if there is anything worth celebrating about India,
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it isn't military muscle, economic power.
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All of that is necessary,
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but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome.
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Somebody said we are super poor, and we are also super power.
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We can't really be both of those.
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We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the
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hardware of development,
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the ports, the roads, the airports,
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all the infrastructural things we need to do,
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and the software of development,
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the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India
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to be able to have a couple of square meals a day,
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to be able to send his or her children
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to a decent school,
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and to aspire to work a job
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that will give them opportunities in their lives
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that can transform themselves.
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But, it's all taking place, this great adventure of conquering those challenges,
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those real challenges which none of us can pretend don't exist.
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But, it's all taking place in an open society,
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in a rich and diverse and plural civilization,
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in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill
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the creative energies of its people.
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That's why India belongs at TED,
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and that's why TED belongs in India.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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