A story of hope…and a small dream
Regular readers may remember one of my fond dreams that I first mentioned on the blog more than a year ago.
This dream was the “Hope Summit” – first indicated in a post in Sept ’08 (and many times since). An idea that was hatched over an animated dinner discussion one summer night in Delhi might finally become a reality.
This coming weekend, a small number of political activists and representatives from half-a-dozen political groups will meet in Pune to discuss our approach towards electoral politics, the challenge of creating an alternative political force in India and lessons learnt from past experiences.
The over-riding objective of the conference is to help build trust and develop relationships between the various groups.
This effort would have been very difficult but for the generous sponsorship of MAEER’s School of Government – who not only agreed to offer a venue but also promised support in terms of logistics and coordination. A special thanks to the Dean and the team at MIT-SOG.
More on this next week….In the meantime, wish us good luck and stay tuned.
Related Posts:
Changing India – One Step at a Time
P.S. I am traveling until the 15th of January with very limited internet access. There will be some delay before I am able to respond to (and moderate) comments. Thank you for your patience, understanding and support.
Pl. note that if you do not enter a valid email address while leaving a comment, it is very likely to get stuck in the moderation/spam queue.
Many congratulations on organising the summit and best wishes for it’s success.
Jai Hind!
Jai
Thanks Jai…unfortunately this has to be postponed now…
** Extract from my twitter feed
Got a glimpse of systemic breakdown y’day. After 6 hrs @ airport, BA tells us flight is cancelled. Get home past midnight. Bags missing.
***
More on this tomorrow
My first thought yesterday was “Not Again!” Sadly it turned out to be true.
I was really looking forward to the rescheduled Hope Summit on Sunday (earlier planned for January) but it was not to be.
In January the skies raged; this time it was the turn of the mountains… I am writing this from about 10,000 miles away, stuck with a cancelled flight due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland.
I will not go into the details of the chaos and disruption over the last 30+ hrs but as a consequence, we have taken a call to postpone the Summit (once again).
This has been a hugely frustrating and disappointing experience. We did explore all options before taking the call on cancelling the Summit (including my participation by tele-conference). But my presence was probably the least important thing. There was a lot of logistics/coordination and preparatory work that had to happen before 18th. I was deeply involved in all of that but the whole thing fell out of gear since I am stranded at a foreign airport with very intermittent connectivity, no other means of communication and no clarity on whats happening next. In fact I have no idea whether I will be on the ground or in the air on 18th/Sunday and in which time zone.
I am praying and hoping that we get third time lucky…and trying hard to keep my spirits up.
P.S. Nixon wrote to me in an email, “first snow, then ash… 🙂 hope not water next time…
I really hope not!