CHENNAI: The roomful of people (quite a random assortment at that) at VR Chennai’s Madras House were faced with one question, one that rendered them unexpectedly quiet for a few minutes when was the last time you felt awe? Not to blame the pandemic for everything but two years of worry, sickness and death certainly seems to have coloured our idea of the world and its little pleasures.
Perhaps, some might say that’s the very reason the little pleasures seem all the more precious. For after that short pause, the answers that came up were about these very same pleasures last week’s rains, listening to a really good song, food, and more. As personal as these experiences are — awe certainly tends to be pretty close to the chest — TEDxNapierBridgeSalon tried to bring this assortment of people together and offer a chance at awe that is collective and connective. That question was just the start.
For a few people in the audience, this was the first TEDx experience. For a few others, this was the first Salon experience. So, even though the day’s theme was Spellbound, it started off with its audience being more tongue-tied than awed. But there’s little room for that when cape-clad hosts lead you into an impromptu word association game. It was just what the artsy folk in attendance (engineering can be artful too) needed. While we were still a way away from awe, it was enough prep to dive into curated TED talks of the day.
From Christoph Niemann’s idea of art perception as a language unto itself to Janet Echelman’s exploration into alternative art installations with woven nets, there was plenty of awe that art had to provide. Beau Lotto following it up with ‘How we experience awe — and why it matters’, in the company of an awe-inspiring Cirque du Soleil performance, we’d finally arrived at Spellbound. What followed — Marco Tempest’s digital sleight of hand and Rob Legato’s machinations behind the screen of blockbusters — were the perfect foil to the theme.
Audience take
Aishwarya Ganesh, a TEDx newbie, certainly agrees. She would say as much about the conversations that followed too. “They (the team) brought out the essence of the theme so well through the talks. The theme itself was very interesting. The curation was well done. The questions and prompts that they had during the conversations also were very nice. My favourite talk is the one with the cinematographer (Legato). Cinema too is a form of magic, that brings awe to the screen. That was a very interesting way to look at magic, beyond conventional ideas of tricks and mentalism. I liked the perspective it gave,” she says.
For Akshayaa P, on the other hand, it was Tharun Iyer’s live performance that held all the magic. The mentalist who has delighted and mesmerised audiences across the country got to show off his skills of observation and deduction in front of this particular audience that by then needed little persuasion for awe. From ‘flag in the mouth’ tricks to disturbingly accurate ‘mind readings’, he served them all. “I was constantly wondering about what he’ll do next,” she says, terming his performance as spine chilling.
After all this, the audience still managed to find more room for awe — in making new friends, in expressing curiosity in the creative work of fellow artists and writers, in establishing bonds that may last beyond the TEDx world. If after two years of varying degrees of shut-in-ness, we can muster the spirits within to make all this happen through the course of one evening, isn’t that enough reason for awe?
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